Karly

If there is a poem that for some reason screams “Spring” to me, it’s Down By The Salley Gardens. It’s one of those poems that hasn’t just lingered on the page, but that I feel I carry with me on a daily basis. It’s quiet, simple and wistful, yet it holds a kind of wisdom that we only seem to understand once it’s too late. In case you’re not familiar with it, this is the poem:

I was first introduced to Down by the Salley Gardens not through a book, but through a film. The Children Act, starring Emma Thompson, is what brought the poem to me, and in some ways, what brought it into my life in the way only poetry can quietly settle in and stay. Her character, Fiona Maye, is a High Court judge tasked with an impossible case involving a teenage boy refusing a life-saving blood transfusion on religious grounds. It’s a film about ethics and law, but beneath that, it’s also about emotional disconnection, longing, and the fragile threads that bind people together.

One of the most poignant moments arrives unexpectedly. Fiona, who is typically composed and guarded, sings a few lines of Yeats’ poem to the boy during a hospital visit. It’s a moment of vulnerability, and she sings it almost hesitantly, almost like a lullaby. Her voice is soft and trembling, filled with something deeper than words, something you feel in your chest before your mind can make sense of it. That moment took my breath away. It wasn’t just that she was singing, it was that she was reaching. That somehow, in the face of everything she couldn’t say, poetry stepped in to say it for her.

It struck me then how poetry can live inside people, how it can surface in the quiet spaces between the unspoken. How a line remembered can become a lifeline.

Later in the film, unless I’m misremembering (it’s been a while since I watched it), Fiona sits down at a piano and plays a full rendition of the poem, set to music. It’s delicate and devastating. It’s an act of mourning, yes, but also of connection. A final gesture. The kind you make not because you know what to say, but because you don’t.

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet…

The poem is short, only two stanzas, and deceptively simple. But within that brevity is a lifetime’s worth of feeling. The speaker remembers a walk by the river with someone he loved. He was young, perhaps foolish. She bid him take life easy—“as the leaves grow on the tree.” But he didn’t listen. And now, he looks back on it all with quiet ache and soft regret.

What I love about Yeats in this poem is how he captures something so universal: the human tendency to ignore good advice until it’s too late. It’s not a grand tragedy, not a scream into the void. It’s quiet. Gentle. Like the poem itself is grieving, but with its eyes closed, remembering.

There’s something beautifully Irish in that kind of melancholy. That lyrical sorrow. That tender regret. But there’s hope, too, in the remembering. In the idea that maybe we can carry the wisdom forward, even if we didn’t learn it in time. That maybe someone else will hear it before they make the same mistake. Or maybe we’ll remember it just in time, next time.

That line, “she bid me take life easy”, lodged itself into my head the moment I heard it, and somehow, over time, it’s become a mantra.

When I’m spiraling over things I can’t control, when deadlines stack up and my mind runs faster than my body can keep up, I hear it like a whisper. Take life easy, as the leaves grow on the tree. Not because everything will be fine or because the world isn’t hard—but because we’re allowed to slow down. Because life is allowed to unfold slowly. Because not everything is meant to be rushed, and not every heartbreak is meant to be fixed.

I repeat it sometimes like a grounding exercise. Other times, it surfaces out of nowhere when I’m walking to the shop or staring out a train window. I don’t even mean to summon it—but there it is.

There’s something about poetry that does that—it buries itself inside you quietly, then returns when you need it most. You don’t always know when it happened, but suddenly, a line becomes yours.

So now, in the chaos of modern life, when things spin too fast, I find myself turning to Yeats. Not for answers, but for reminders. For gentleness. For space.

It’s not always possible to take life easy, but just trying to, just pausing long enough to want to, feels like a kind of poetry in itself.