Today’s poem, “Down by the Salley Gardens,” suggests the Pre-Raphaelite impulse to recapture, or to recreate in improved form, something ancient. Yeats’s own note on this poem indicates that it ...

There isn’t an actual place called the Salley Gardens, or at least there wasn’t when Yeats wrote the poem. Rather, he probably used the word “salley” to refer to the Irish word “Saileach ...