Barry Cotton's "Cloud" begins by speaking directly to the sky. One word and a comma, "Clouds,", work like a greeting, the way you might call out to someone you have been watching for a while. Then comes the confession that drives everything else: "Wish I was you." Five lines later the same words return unchanged, and the poem ends exactly where it began. That circle matters. Nothing in the speaker's situation changes between the first wish and the last, and the reasons listed in between only deepen the longing.
What the speaker envies is not what we might expect. There is no wish to fly, to be enormous, or to be powerful. Instead the clouds are imagined as lucky in three quiet ways. They can "enjoy every second of the scenery," they are "free to go anywhere," and "no one asks why or scolds you." The third is the most revealing. Freedom here means above all freedom from questions. Someone who dreams of never being asked "why" is probably asked it often, so the poem suggests a speaker surrounded by demands for explanation and by reprimand. We never learn who does the scolding, and the poem is stronger for leaving it vague. Anyone who has felt watched can fill in the name.
The last reason, "They even praises you for your beauty," adds something more tender. The word "even" is the key. Praise arrives as a bonus on top of freedom, a surprise rather than a reward. Scolding and praise become the two ways other people judge us, and the cloud escapes the first while collecting only the second. Perhaps the speaker wants more than to be left alone. Perhaps they want to be admired for simply existing, with nothing to prove.
The form supports this lightness. There is no rhyme scheme and the lines are short, but the sound is carefully uneven. "Free to go anywhere" is brief and buoyant, almost weightless. The line before it, "Can enjoy every second of the scenery," is the longest, and its rolling rhythm stretches out like time with nothing to fill it. By contrast, "No one asks why or scolds you" is built from blunt single syllables, clipped like the interruptions it describes. Faint echoes hold the poem together. "Scenery" and "beauty" end on the same soft unstressed sound, and "you" closes three of the six lines after the opening address, so the cloud is what the speaker's voice keeps landing on.
The language is plain and spoken. "Wish I was you" drops the "I" that formal English would expect before "Can enjoy," and uses "was" where a formal grammar would want "were." "They even praises you" has a verb that does not agree with its subject. Whether these roughnesses are deliberate or accidental, they give the voice the ring of someone talking half to themselves rather than performing. Polish might actually have weakened that effect.
There is also an irony the poem never states. Real clouds do not choose their route, since wind carries them, and they cannot enjoy a view. The speaker lends them a free, watching mind, which makes "Cloud" less a poem about the sky than about the person looking up. The cloud is a blank screen on which a wish is projected. It is also worth noticing that the title is singular while the address is plural. Judging by this, the speaker may have singled out one cloud from the crowd, as people do when they imagine a drifting shape belongs to them.
The poem's significance lies in this smallness. In a handful of lines it names a feeling many readers will recognise: the wish to float above judgment and still be seen as lovely. It asks for no grand rescue, only a little space, and that modesty is what makes the repeated "Wish I was you" ache.