What is the most misunderstood or misinterpreted famous poem, and what does it actually mean?

[Leopard96]

Some of the most widely known and frequently quoted poems in the English language have also become some of the most consistently misread, often stripped of their original context or irony and repurposed into something the poet arguably never actually intended. Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken is probably the single most famous example, a poem overwhelmingly quoted at graduations and in motivational contexts as a straightforward celebration of individualism and taking the road less travelled, despite the poem's own text making clear that both paths were actually worn about the same, and that the speaker openly admits he will likely exaggerate the significance of his choice later on in life, a far more ambiguous and self aware poem than its popular reputation usually suggests.

Other frequently misread poems include Rudyard Kipling's If, sometimes read purely as a simple list of admirable stoic virtues without much attention to the poem's own tangled relationship with British imperial ideas of masculinity that Kipling was writing within at the time, and Maya Angelou's Still I Rise, which is occasionally reduced to a generic inspirational quote without full acknowledgement of the specific, deliberate racial and historical context the poem is actually addressing throughout.

What other famous poems do you think get consistently misread or oversimplified from their actual intended meaning, and what do you think the poem is actually trying to say once you look past its more popular, simplified reputation?

[Outlaw]

The Road Not Taken is such a perfect example because the misreading is so widespread it has practically become the poem's dominant cultural meaning at this point, completely overwhelming what Frost actually wrote on the page.