Most of this short poem is about something missing. William Corbett begins with a wish, "My reflection in the clouds / Chinese drunken poets desire", and then cancels it: "No clouds today." Without clouds there is nothing for the speaker's image to settle in, and the poem has to decide what to do with that emptiness.
The opening sentence twists its grammar. The ordinary order would be "Chinese drunken poets desire my reflection in the clouds." Corbett puts the object first, so "My reflection" is the very first thing we read, just before we learn it isn't there. The line is also ambiguous. It could mean that the speaker's reflection is what those poets would long for, or that the speaker wants what they wanted. Either way, the speaker steps into a tradition of poets who drink and gaze at sky and water, without naming a single one. Readers who know the legend of Li Bai drowning while reaching for the moon's reflection in a river may hear a warning folded into the romance. That is an inference, since the poem never names him, but the poem's ending supports it.
The central image arrives in the fourth line: "a sky as clear as gin / to swim or drown in." The simile does two jobs at once. Gin is clear, so it matches the cloudless sky. It is also a drink, so the simile carries the title's drunkenness into the weather. A sky that looks like gin looks like water, and the next line turns it into water: you could "swim or drown" in it. The "or" matters. The poem doesn't choose between pleasure and danger, because from the surface the two look identical. There's no punctuation after "gin" either, so the sentence slides forward just as the speaker might slide into the thing he is describing.
Then comes the poem's boldest move. After a gap, one line stands alone: "the river takes this bend". It is lowercase, unpunctuated and nearly regular in rhythm, with three beats: *the RIV-er TAKES this BEND*. It is also a bend in the poem. The white space around it makes us pause, and the line's sudden calm feels like a river changing direction. The speaker has disappeared by now. "My" gave way to "the," and the personal wish has become a landscape doing its own thing.
The last two lines are quietly ominous: the river "goes where air and water / don't meet as friends." This is where the earlier images come together. A reflection exists only where air and water meet, so the place the drunken poets wanted to reach is also where one element ends and the other begins. If they "don't meet as friends," the meeting is a collision, and anyone who goes in after a beautiful image is the one who gets hurt. The phrase is plain and almost childlike, which makes it more chilling. Corbett doesn't say "drowning." He leaves the word to the reader, who has already been handed "drown" two stanzas earlier.
The poem's sound is spare but not careless. There is no regular rhyme scheme, and the lines run from three syllables to eight or nine. Yet rhyme turns up at the key moments: "gin" and "in" close the sky image, and "bend" and "friends" close the poem. The echoes are faint, but they make the ends of the two images feel settled, as if the poem were tying a knot. The title, "Drunkenness 4," suggests one of a series, though the poem never says so, and its tone fits that idea: it reads like a single observation from a longer, ongoing meditation.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It takes a romantic idea, the poet who finds his own face in nature, and tests it on a bright, empty day. Nature offers no flattering mirror, only a clarity that is attractive and potentially lethal. The poem moves from wanting to be seen to watching a river go somewhere indifferent. It admires the old tradition and doubts it at the same moment, and it does so in under forty words.