Fear in this storm arrives through the ears. Clare gives us almost nothing to look at, only a darkness that keeps "thickening", but a great deal to hear: woods that sob, a darkness that "clamours", a roar like rivers "breaking loose in floods". Even the title plays a small trick. We are promised a wind, yet the word does not appear until line six, and then only as half of a guess: the cotter is "half doubting whether it be floods or wind". The central idea lives in that doubt. At night, with nothing to see, a storm becomes a noise, the imagination fills in the gaps, and what it supplies is catastrophe.
The opening lines are packed with personification. The woods sob, and the darkness behaves like a messenger bringing "dismal tidings of the rain", as if bad news were being shouted from house to house. The flood arrives only as a simile, "as rivers breaking loose", but the verbs pile up as though it were real: "spread and foam and deluge all the plain". Nothing in the poem tells us that any river has actually burst its banks. The water exists only in the sound, and that is the point. The metaphor keeps growing until the night itself becomes something to drown in: travellers must pass "through night's black depths", with danger personified as a figure dressed in "garb".
Then the poem moves indoors, and the focus narrows from landscape to cottage. The cotter stands at his door, but he is not worried about himself. He thinks of "roads that travel has to find", of people still out in the dark. The scene by the fire is the most vivid. The "loud glabber round the flaze" is homely, dialect-flavoured language, and from context "glabber" must mean chatter and "flaze" the blaze of the hearth. The gl- and fl- sounds are noisy in themselves. Then one lifted hand silences it all. The dame, "fearing" and in "dread", believes "a deluge comes to drown the land". Here the poem's earlier simile has hardened into belief. What the poet offered as a comparison, she takes as fact. "Deluge" also carries an echo of the Bible's great flood, though that is my inference from the word, not something the poem says.
The form quietly supports all this. Fourteen lines suggest a sonnet, but the rhyme scheme wanders from the expected pattern. The opening quatrain rhymes woods, rain, floods, plain, and then "again" adds a third rhyme on that long "-ain" sound, so it keeps returning like rain on a roof. The middle lines alternate wind/find with afraid/arrayed. The last five lines close in a loop: "stops" and "drops" bracket the rhymes hand/land, while "dread" stands at a line end with no partner, an isolated word. The metre is mostly iambic pentameter, but the final line, "Nor dares she go to bed until the tempest drops", stretches to six beats. That extra length makes the line drag, like the long wait it describes. It also ends on a word that suits the weather, since both rain and wind can "drop". The tempest has not dropped yet, and the poem stops in the middle of the waiting.
Clare grew up in Helpston, Northamptonshire, the son of a farm labourer, and the poem seems at home in that world rather than looking down on it. Many storm poems put the observer on a hilltop, admiring the spectacle. Here the storm is felt from inside a cottage, by people with roads to worry about and a fire to keep burning. Words like "cotter", "dame" and "flaze" belong to their own lives, not to a visitor's. The poem is significant because it takes ordinary people's fear seriously. It shows how sound, darkness and imagination can turn a rainy night into the end of the world, and it lets that fear stay unresolved to the last line.