Comment by LPisGood
23 days ago
A more charitable interpretation might be that most people have read this poem maybe once while half paying attention in school and they have forgotten all of the details except for the famous line and the cultural context that it usually comes with.
I think your more charitable interpretation is also more-correct, but it is still an indictment of sorts: we’ve all read this poem, but very very few were critically paying attention to what we read. We mostly trusted our instincts, and didn’t care to double check.
To be fair, I don’t think we can expect more of elementary school kids. But I think I might have read it in high school, and should have done better.