Most cloaks keep the weather out. The one in Peter John Dean's "My Cloak" takes it in. The speaker begins by drawing "the winds" inside it, and its folds become "clouds and trees," its lining a green world where rain runs "in satin streamers." By the end the speaker has followed the weather inside, and all that remains in sight is "a still dark heap." The poem is about the gap between the outside of a person and the inside: a private landscape so complete that entering it means vanishing from the ordinary world.
The opening builds that landscape with surprising softness. Calling rain "satin streamers" turns something cold and wet into something smooth and ribbon-like, almost festive. "Green and green on green" piles up its layers the way leaves do, and the repeated word gives the line a lush thickness. Yet the poem keeps admitting that this world is made. The cloak's curves are "embroidered with a mimic earth," which is not earth but a stitched copy of it. Judging by the imagery, the cloak seems a figure for imagination or daydream rather than a literal garment, since nothing else explains how a piece of cloth could hold weather.
The poem's shape does as much work as its words. It is free verse, with no regular metre and no rhyme in the opening lines. The first four lines are of similar length and sound almost conversational. Then the poem splits into single-line stanzas, each one a held breath. "Taut with its inner winds I hold this cloak" stands alone, and "taut" makes us feel the fabric strained like a sail. The next line, "Its billowing curves embroidered with a mimic earth," is the longest in the poem, and its slow stretch fills out like the cloak itself. Then comes the sharpest moment: "Then quickly snap the fastening shut." The short words and hard consonants click like the clasp they describe.
After that the lines drain away. "And let it fall / Let all / Collapsing over / Cover me." They shrink to two or three words each, so the poem visibly deflates as the cloak loses its air. Only here does rhyme appear, as "fall" chimes with "all" and "over" with "Cover." The sounds settle together just as the fabric does. The grammar gives way too. "Let all / Collapsing over / Cover me" is not a tidy sentence, and "all" could mean the winds, clouds and trees, or the whole garment. Because the meaning stays loose, world and cloak come down together, and the sentence collapses as it describes collapsing.
The final couplet is a sharp turn. "Outside there lies a still dark heap" strips away everything the opening gave us. The wind, the green and the streaming rain are replaced by "still," "dark," and the flattest word available, "heap." Notice the viewpoint, though. Who is looking at the heap from outside? The speaker seems to have split in two, one self hidden inside the cloak and another imagining how that hidden self appears to everyone else. Then the last line reverses the picture: "inside I am now my cloak." The speaker no longer wears the cloak but is it, and "now" marks the change as complete. The speaker has become the wind-filled, tree-folded world.
The poem refuses to say whether this is a joy or a loss. The "dark heap" suggests a cost, a withdrawal that looks like nothing from outside. The green interior suggests the reward, a richness that no onlooker can see. The strongest reading holds both: imagination as shelter, and as a place where you can disappear.
That balance is what makes the poem worth reading. In under a dozen lines it takes one ordinary object and gives it more space inside than outside. It also performs its own idea, swelling and then falling, so that we experience the cloak's inflation and collapse as well as hearing about them. The "mimic earth" admission invites one more thought. A poem, too, is a small stitched thing that looks modest from outside and holds weather within, if the reader is willing to step in.