The experience of reading poetry over a lifetime is different from reading any other form. You accumulate poems as you accumulate experiences — they're associated with the times and places you read them, with the questions you were asking when you encountered them. A poem you read at twenty is not the same poem at forty.

I've been tracking which poems I return to across years and trying to understand the pattern. What I find is that the poems I return to most are not the ones I found most beautiful on first encounter. They're the ones that said something I wasn't ready to hear but couldn't forget. The poem that came before the experience it named.

Auden's 'Musee des Beaux Arts' is an example. I read it in school and thought it was about Icarus. I read it at thirty-two during a bad year and understood it was about the relationship between suffering and the ordinary world that continues around it. The poem was always both things. I just needed the second reading.