Not a Yeats Fan.

For some reason I’ve been trawling through YouTube this week, looking for different versions of the Irish classic ballad Down by the Sally Gardens. So now I’m going to stand against the wall, tie the blindfold myself, and wait for the assembled ranks of Irishmen and poetry lovers to ready their Lee Enfields.

The song has a beautiful melody which readily attracts some very lovely and evocative arrangements. The problem is that the lyrics are a poem by WB Yeats. Not only do I dislike WB Yeats, I’d go so far as to say that I think his poetry is awful. His lyric poems are clumsy and immaturely contrived, while his later political stuff is insufferably dense and turgid. I really don’t understand why he’s regarded as a great poet.

For me, good lyrical prose far outweighs poor poetry. It’s less pretentious.

Oh, and by the way, I think the whole shallow, glitzy, glamorous Celtic Woman phenomenon is the ultimate insult to good Irish music. Listen to the likes of Luke Kelly, Dolores Keane and Patrick Street instead.