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The cloud is the daughter of the earth and water. It is the nursling of the sky.

Personification is a figure of speech in which human qualities are attributed to non-living things. The cloud is a nonliving object. In the poem, the cloud tells what it is and what it does like a human being. It brings rain and provides shade, it makes the sweet buds blossom. It wields the flail of hail like the man who threshes the grain with a flail. It dissolves the hailstones. It laughs as it passes in thunderstorms. It is personified as the daughter of the earth and water and a baby who is taken care of by the sky. After the rain the sky becomes clear and the cloud arises again like a child from the womb of its mother, like a ghost from the tomb.

Poets use imagery to heighten the effect of the poem. They use similes, metaphors to produce word pictures in the minds of the readers. This poem is rich in such word pictures. The image of flowers waiting for rain, the cloud providing light shade for the leaves sleeping at noon are the word pictures in the first stanza. The dew drops wakening the buds, the picture of the cloud wielding the flail of lashing hail, the picture of a little baby, the clear blue sky without the clouds and the cloud gradually building up again are the other pictures that come to our mind when we read the poem.