He recalls past encounters with a woman and simultaneously visualizes his remembered or imagined self, referred to as M1, acting out the described motions within the circle of light.
[4] He changes into night attire, enters his sanctum, attempts to summon the woman without success, and at dawn, he dresses once again and sets out on the road.
When he reaches the third one the camera cuts to the woman's face, "reduced as far as possible to eyes and a mouth",[2] which mouths silently along with the voice, "...clouds...but the clouds...of the sky..."[5] The man then realises there is a fourth case, but not really a fourth per se because so much of the time, and in fact, the majority of the time when nothing happens, the woman never makes an appearance at all.
Despite the impression created by the opening scene, it is not the case that he spends every night solely focused on summoning the woman to appear.
There are instances when he becomes weary and engages in other activities that he finds "more ... rewarding, such as ... cube roots"[5] or sits absorbed with nothing – which he describes as a mine – like the man in Film.
The title comes from a phrase from the last verse of W. B. Yeats's near-solipsist poem, The Tower: Several months after the McWhinnie production in which he was himself heavily involved, Beckett had the opportunity to act as his own director in the German version, Nur noch Gewölk, for Süddeutscher Rundfunk.
"The Tower is a work which discusses history and the past not only in terms of recollection but also as an entire complex of traces, remainders and legacies of which individual subjective memory is only one element.
"[6] "The painful, highly personal question raised by Yeats is: if the poet's physical powers fail, if his vision and hearing are impaired, can the memory of the sensory world serve as a basis for poetry?
... As he draws upon his memory, revisiting scenes both in his life and works, he comes to respond affirmatively to the pessimistic question first raised ...
Indeed, in the stanza from which Beckett derived his title, Yeats puts the real world in perspective, thereby reducing his own sense of loss.
"Clouds seem permanent but are ultimately impermanent; they cannot be touched, yet can be seen; they are nothing more than condensed water, yet remain a symbol of romance, of the imagination beyond practical measurement – they are, in a phrase, at once here and elsewhere.
The action of ... but the clouds ... consists of M reliving past experience with such intensity that he can see himself performing his daily routine.
That which is not consciously 'remembered' by an individual can still return to impose itself is a variety of ways, one of which both Yeats and Beckett qualify as a kind of haunting.
His careful efforts to establish mathematically the exact and proper conditions for her appearance are merely an attempt to give order to an experience he knows, deep inside, is beyond rational measurement or prediction.
"[17] He would prefer that the woman appears when he thinks of her, that there should exist a clear correlation between conscious thought and realisation but his is not the case.
Enoch Brater suggests that ... but the clouds ... has more in common with Yeats than simply The Tower: "As Katharine Worth has pointed out, in Yeatsian terminology 'shades' [the final word of Yeats's poem] necessarily conjures up thoughts of spirits or ghosts along with the onset of evening, and Beckett's play only reinforces this somewhat understated nuance.
Is the process wholly internal, the man remembering someone real from his past or is he trying to conjure up some external manifestation of her, her ghost?
Is it simply to satisfy memory, to wallow in the moment awhile as Krapp does, or is she in some way his muse, an enabling force that makes the words come?