John Lennon? Birthday Card? Dixie Lee Crosby? Dixie Willson? Anonymous?
Dear Quote Investigator: I am a big fan of the Beatles, and I think I have a good mental picture of my favorite band member, John Lennon. The following popular pair of statements is often credited to Lennon, but I think the attribution is false:
Count your age by friends, not years.
Count your life by smiles, not tears.
Disagreement with a friend of mine about these words has led to a social rift. The prevalence of incorrect ascriptions is irritating to me. Yet, an expression like this can have a deep emotional resonance for an individual, and skepticism about an attribution can be viewed as callous. Perhaps an exploration of this saying will help to repair our relationship.
Quote Investigator: The musician John Lennon was born in 1940. The earliest evidence of this quotation located by QI was printed in a newspaper in 1927. Hence, Lennon did not craft these two statements. They were part of a larger poem that was printed in a birthday card given to a woman in Richfield Springs, New York when she attained her ninetieth year:
The following quotation is taken from one of the many beautiful greeting cards:
“Count your garden by the flowers,
never by the leaves that fall;
Count your days by golden hours
don’t remember clouds at all!
Count the night by stars, not shadows
Count your life with smiles—not tears
And with joy on today’s birthday,
count your age by friends—not years!”
In 1931 a newspaper in Roswell, New Mexico published a version of the poem under the title “Count Your Blessings” without an attribution. The first four lines were identical to those given above. The end of the poem was slightly different, e.g., the mention of a birthday was omitted:
Count your nights by stars — not shadows;
Count your life with smiles, not tears — and with joy
Count your age by friends, not years.
–Author Unknown To Us.
In 1933 a newspaper in Anniston, Alabama printed an article titled “How ‘Count Your Garden’ Was Written”. The author of the poem was identified as Dixie Willson:
Into the Volland office one day came Dixie Willson. She had come to see the editor. “I’m broke,” she told the editor. “And not only broke, but I haven’t eaten in so long that the old belt won’t pull any tighter. But I can write verses. If I should write a greeting verse for you, would you buy it?” “Write it, and I’ll see what I can do,” said the editor.
The article stated that Willson wrote a verse that was accepted, and she received $5 from the editor. Willson and the editor went to dinner which she generously paid for with the money. Finis for the $5.
But it wasn’t finis for the verse: it was the beginning of an edition that has passed the half-million publication mark. For the verse that she wrote is this favorite of greeting card buyers everywhere:
Count your garden by the flowers, never by the leaves that fall;
Count your days by golden hours, don’t remember clouds at all!
Count your nights by stars—not shadows; count your life with smiles—not tears.
And with joy, on this your birthday—count your age by friends—not years.
In February 1935 an inquiry about the poem was printed in the “Queries and Answers” section of the New York Times:
S. H. requests the title and the name of the author of the poem which contains the following lines, possibly not quite correctly quoted:
Don’t count your troubles
By the leaves that fall.
The poem ends with these lines:
Don’t count your birthdays by the years that pass
But by the friends you have.
In March 1935 a partial answer to the inquiry was published in the “Queries and Answers” section of the New York Times:
The poem desired by S. H. (Feb. 3) appears as a popular birthday card and bears no author’s name.
After the remark above, the paper printed a poem very similar to the one given in the 1927 citation, and after the poem the following comment appeared:
Several readers sent these lines, but none of them was able to give the title or the author’s name. One correspondent informs us that the poem has been set to music by Harriet Ware and published by G. Schirmer, Inc.
In April 1935 a sardonic article about the greeting-card business by E. B. White was published in The New Yorker magazine. The article presented a different identity for the author of the poem:
Bing Crosby’s wife, Dixie Lee, is one of the people who have lived to regret the passing of the royalty system. Miss Lee, about six years ago, sold to the P. F. Volland Company the following poem:
Count your garden by the flowers,
Never by the leaves that fall,
Count your days by golden hours,
Don’t remember clouds at all;
Count your nights by stars, not shadows,
Count your life with smiles, not tears,
And with joy on this, your birthday,
Count your age by friends, not years.
The firm paid her five bucks, and she blew most of it taking one of the editors to lunch. The next few months she watched her greeting become a best-seller.
The year specified in the article for the sale of the poem was six years before 1935, i.e., in 1929, but the card was already in circulation by 1927. This slight inaccuracy does not rule out the correctness of the authorship indicated. Also, The New Yorker was once praised for the high-quality of its fact-checking.
Here are additional selected citations in chronological order.
Continue reading “Count Your Age by Friends, Not Years. Count Your Life by Smiles, Not Tears”