Poetry has a feature that distinguishes it from most prose: it can bear rereading at the level of the individual line in a way that prose paragraphs usually can't. When you return to a poem you've read ten times, the lines don't become dull. They become more themselves.

This is because poetry operates by compression — every word is doing maximum work, and the work reveals itself over multiple encounters. The first reading is discovery. The second reading is recognition. The fifth reading is intimacy. By the tenth reading you have a relationship with the poem that is different in kind from your relationship with even a beloved passage of prose.

The poem I've read most often is 'The Snow Man' by Wallace Stevens. I've read it perhaps sixty times over fifteen years. I don't understand it fully and I don't expect to. That's not a failure. That's the point.