It seems that many positive responses here stem from a sentimental attachment to the poem, which makes me wonder (without having any way of answering my question) how people here would have responded to the poem today, here and now, if they had never encountered it before and so had no sentimental associations. Would it resonate so as to become a sentimental favorite among many of us? Would we praise it as one of our favorite poems? Would it stand out as something special? My own speculation is that it would not. Of course, this begs the question of how the poem came to be a sentimental favorite in the first place, which of course is quite an achievement for a poem, but it seems to me at least possible for a "bad poem" to achieve that status (again, think of "Trees"), or for a poem to be good enough to somehow achieve that status without being good enough to make a mark on those whose upbringing did not include it (someone like me).
Merely observing that its fairly standard meter is handled well isn't enough of an explanation, of course, since lots of less noteworthy poems can make the same claim, and I'm not seeing anything particularly dazzling or original in the choice of seven beat lines.
I'd be curious how Nemo's father used it to teach about life, since it doesn't speak to me about life in any original way that I can discern. Though the second line is wonderful, there's an awful lot of filler until the overtidy final line.
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