The Cloud by Percy Bysshe Shelley
A personified cloud describes bringing rain and shade to flowers, scattering hail and snow, and travelling with lightning above earth and sea. It carries the colours of sunrise, sunset, moonlight, and the rainbow, then declares that its changing forms never die: after rain clears the sky, it rises again.
By Percy Bysshe Shelley · Genre: Nature Poetry, Lyric Poetry, Personification · 938 words
First lines
I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, / From the seas and the streams; / I bear light shade for the leaves when laid / In their noonday dreams. / 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. / I wield the flail of the lashing hail, / And whiten the green plains under, / And then again I dissolve it in rain, / And laugh as I pass in thunder.
Genres
- Nature Poetry — The cloud describes precipitation, shifting light, storms, and its repeated passage between water and sky.
- Lyric Poetry — Six rhyming stanzas sustain the cloud's first-person voice as it recounts its movements and transformations.
- Personification — The cloud speaks, laughs, sleeps, and claims enduring life, while lightning pilots it and thunder struggles beneath it.
Tags
clouds · rain · snow · lightning · water cycle · personification
What this Textopian page supports
The Cloud is listed on Textopian as a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, dated Date unknown.
This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.
- Work type: Poem
- Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Date: Date unknown
- Language: English
- Genres: Nature Poetry, Lyric Poetry, Personification
- Length: 938 words
- Structure: 1 section, 6 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Standard (8th-9th Grade)
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- Work identity for The Cloud by Percy Bysshe Shelley
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