Cloud Gods: Climate Cycles and the Eco-Utopia of Water in Percy Shelley’s “The Cloud”

Abstract: This essay examines how Percy Bysshe Shelley uses his poem about climate cycles, “The Cloud” (1820), to investigate the indispensable role of water as an ecological characteristic of the natural world. It argues that Shelley highlights the transmissive, generative, and even destructive dimensions of water through the Cloud’s various manifestations. Using an interpretive lens focused on the poem’s sequential structure, it further demonstrates that the multiple agencies of water within the poem help to formulate a more capacious understanding of the connections Shelley sees in the way hydrological cycles model an ideal for fostering human community. By engaging with Shelley’s representation of water as a critical anchor within Earth’s climate cycle, the essay looks to reveal how Shelley expresses an expansive vision of ecological utopia that depicts human integration into the hydro-cycles of the planet, thus imagining humanity’s manifold assimilation into the configuration of the ecosphere.