Nothing in "The coming storm" happens until its final line, and even then it is hard to say what. That is the poem's trick. It is built out of waiting, and it makes the reader wait with a narrowed eye. The title promises weather, but the opening stanza gives us a mood: "the soul of suspicion / about all this quiet." The grammar is incomplete, with no verb to say who or what is suspicious. Is the speaker the soul of suspicion, or has the quiet itself become suspect? That small uncertainty sets the tone. Here silence is not peace but a held breath.
The second stanza turns suspicion into a dry joke. "They should employ me / at a company of questions." The speaker imagines distrust as a profession and himself as a natural recruit. "Company" works two ways. It can mean a business, but it can also mean a group of people, as in a company of actors or soldiers, so we picture a whole troop of interrogators. The word "questions" also echoes the opening sound of "quiet," as if the hush has already begun to turn into inquiry. The deadpan humour keeps the unease from tipping into melodrama.
The third stanza is the strangest. "A man well spoken / for a dead man" can be read as a backhanded compliment: articulate, considering he is dead. It can also lean on the older phrase "spoken for," the idea that the dead cannot speak and others must do it on their behalf. The poem does not say who this man is. Judging by the placement, he might be a figure from memory, or he might be a self-portrait of someone who talks well while feeling emptied out. The poem refuses to settle it, and the refusal is part of its method.
Only in the last stanza does the storm arrive, and then only as a simile: "falling and coming to lie / like brisk ice in the discourse of air." The weather is hail or sleet, but the phrasing allows a second picture. The dead man of the previous stanza could be the one falling and coming to lie, a body going down the way ice does. The word "lie" then does double duty. It means to rest on the ground, but it also means to say something untrue, which snaps us back to suspicion and questions. "Discourse" picks up "well spoken," so the air is not just moving but talking, and what it says may not be reliable. "Brisk" suits both cold and speech, since it describes weather and also a quick, businesslike manner of talking.
The form supports all this quietly. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, so the sentences slide into one another and the reader has to supply the pauses, much as one listens in the stillness before bad weather. The four stanzas are all two-liners, and the line lengths are telling. The first stanza is steady, six syllables and then six. The middle stanzas shrink and stumble, five and seven, then five and four, which makes the poem sound hesitant. Then the final stanza opens out to seven and nine syllables, the longest line coming last. After all the tension the poem exhales. The sounds work too. The hushing s of "soul," "suspicion" and "discourse" mimics a held silence, while the short, hard vowels of "brisk ice" crack against it.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does by holding back. It never describes the storm directly, and it never explains the dead man or the speaker's fear. Instead it shows how tension bends language: when everything is too quiet, every word starts to sound questionable, even the word "lie." By the end the reader has quietly taken the job offered in the second stanza, working at the company of questions and trying to decide what in the poem can be believed.