It is important to realise that the persona of this poem
is actually the cloud of the title, who in the poem talks about its various appearances
and what it does during its life. The initial stanza gives a general overview of the
cloud's functions. It waters "the thirsting flowers" as a gentle entity, but at the same
time, there is a violence and a power in the cloud as it "wield[s] the flail of the
lashing hail" and shows its majesty in the "laugh" of thunder. In the second stanza, the
cloud presents itself as being gentle, sleeping during tempests and covering the tops of
mountains. The contemporary belief of how clouds are controlled by electricity in the
atmosphere is explored in this stanza, with the attraction between the two kinds of
electricity that was thought to produce rain being described as
love.
The third verse refers to the course of the sun from
the vantage point of the cloud as it rises and sets. The beauty of the sun's movements
and how they impact the sun are described. The next stanza then moves on to describe the
moon, and again how it impacts the cloud, and the joy that the cloud has in seeing the
stars and how they "whirl and flee, / Like a swarm of golden bees" as the cloud becomes
more fragmented.
The fifth stanza presents the cloud as a
high cloud that envelops the sun and moon when they appear behind it. Then, the cloud
shifts form once again becoming a rain cloud that contains the "Powers of the air" which
are "chained to my chair" as it drops its load of rain on the "laughing" Earth. Lastly,
the final stanza concludes the poem by talking about the clouds relationship with the
elements and its cycle of life:
I am the daughter of Earth and
Water,
And the nursling of the
Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and
shores,
I change, but I cannot
die.
Note the intimate
relation that the cloud claims with the planet and how its eternal nature and changing
form is alluded to. After the rain it is reborn, "Like a child from the womb" to rebuild
its own form.
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