In Practical Criticism , the New Critic I.A. Richards noticed that when students misread it is sometimes because they are controlled by their own stereotypical stock responses rather than the treatment of the ideas in the poem. You won't even notice that an ode is a poem celebrating someone or something. Your stock response to melancholy will blind you to anything that challenges that response. As a result, you will seriously misread the poem. Distinguish between fundamentals and overtones.
Poets love to play with the nuances in words, with connotations, with layered meaning.
To help insure that the message is correctly received. Repetition is a subtle meta-discourse guide to understanding. If you are having problems with a section of the text, consider the possibility that the poet is using a metaphor. Pay attention to significant contrasts . Structuralists would use the term binary oppositions.