Poems are usually expressed with elaborate rhetoric techniques, which make them hard to be understood. In this study, a cross-text annotation sharing mechanism is proposed to help students comprehend poetry by creating and sharing individual annotations. Furthermore, relevant annotations among various texts can be retrieved to stimulate and help students make connections while reading. A quasi-experiment has been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The experimental results show that a cross-text annotation sharing approach is significantly more helpful to the students for poetry comprehension than a conventional annotation sharing approach in terms of learning achievements; moreover, the students highly accepted the developed learning system in terms of "ease of use" and "usefulness." (Contains 5 tables and 7 figures.)