Count Your Garden

Summary 

This poem is about how we should see the positives in life and how we shouldn't pay attention to the negatives, and they used nice examples to explain how we should do that and pay attention to the more important things in life.

Stanza-by-stanza explanation 

Count your garden by the flowers;
Never by the leaves that fall;

In the first stanza, the poet discusses how we should look at the positives in a very nice way. He gives the example of counting our garden by the number of flowers we have, not the number of dry leaves that fall on the ground.

Count your days by golden hours;
Don’t remember clouds at all.

In the second stanza, the poet suggests that we can look at the positives in our lives differently by not counting the clouds but the golden hours of our lives.

Count the nights by stars, not shadows;
Count your life by smiles, not tears;

In the third stanza, the poet gives us a few more examples of how we should look at the positives in life. At night, we should count the stars and not our shadows, and we should count our lives by the number of smiles and good moments, not our tears and sad moments. 

And with joy on every birthday,
Count your age by friends, not years.

In the fourth stanza, the poet talks about how, with every passing year on our birthday, we shouldn't count our age; we should count how many friends we have.