From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about the sun.
Here, at the start of the poem, the cloud describes some of its day-to-day duties. These are the essential but unglamorous parts of being a cloud, which don't garner it much attention. For instance, we see here that the cloud is merely a minor player in the creation of dew, but that this role prompts a joyful, familial routine between flowers, the earth itself, and the sun. Shelley offers an internal rhyme in this first line between "shaken" and "waken," showing that the cloud's work is relatively solitary and self-contained, while the flowers, sun, and earth are all linked via the end rhymes "one" and "sun." But the sun is not resentful of its work, and instead takes evident interest in the scenes that it has helped create.
The triumphal arch through which I march
With hurricane, fire, and snow,
When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair,
Is the million-coloured bow;
In this climactic moment, the cloud becomes the center of attention, completely overshadowing every other personified natural force in the poem. Here, we see that the cloud's helpfulness, nurturing instincts, and sympathy with the rest of the natural world don't mean that it's always going to stay in the background. Instead, like the sun or the moon, it has moments of unapologetic intensity. This moment in the poem offers one hint as to why Shelley has opted to make his speaker a cloud rather than any other natural object: he shows that the cloud, far from being a mere vessel for rain or a negative force blocking the sun, is worthy of attention on its own terms.
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.
In the poem's last lines, the cloud begins to rebuild its strength as the previous stanza's hurricane dissipates. The juxtaposition of "a child from the womb" and "a ghost from the tomb" develops the theme of rebirth, connecting an image of life to an image of death, and using rhyme to demonstrate that the two are related processes. The cloud laughs silently, reassured even in its moment of destruction because it knows that the clear blue skies will soon give way to another storm.
