I agree. The questions seemed perfectly reasonable to me. No test is perfect, but if I had a student who couldn't get these questions right, I'd say their reading comprehension was pretty suspect.
I agree the author reached a little far. These questions are OK if ask we are checking is basic reading comprehension. Not great, but OK. Poetry seems like a weird fit for that kind of assessment though. The content of poetry is usually more complicated than the raw understanding of the words. It seems that these questions want to assess the more complicated inferences and such, they just fail to effectively do so.