Answer:"Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
The poem “The Cloud” by Percy Bysshe Shelley is a lyric, written in anapestic meter, alternating in line lengths between tetrameter and trimeter. In “The Cloud,” Shelly invokes the idea of a cloud as an entity narrating her existence in various aspects. Told in 6 stanzas, Shelley has this cloud tell a unique perspective on what she is in each one.
In the first stanza, we come to understand the cloud in terms of her functions in the cycle of nature, in regards to the cycle of water and the cycle of plant life. The cloud brings water to nourish the plants and vegetation in the form of rain, which is created from the evaporated water of bodies of water. The cloud acts as shelter for the same vegetation from the sweltering heat of the Sun during its hottest hours. The moisture provided by the cloud also serves to awaken budding flowers so they may open to absorb the Sun’s rays. Finally, the cloud also serves reignite the life of plants after they have died, as hail threshes the plants (Lynch 832, note 1), and washes the grain back into the soil, starting the plant cycle over.
