Dating Ives' music is often difficult. This seems to have been written after Ives gave up his last part-time job in music, as organist at a fashionable Manhattan Presbyterian Church. He did so to devote all of his musical efforts to composition while working in a Mutual Insurance Office by day.

Rough Wind might represent Ives delighting in being free of having to write music that was "nice" (a word he came to use as a pejorative). It is based on lines from Shelley and is an outburst of vocal-pianistic violence.

The song is unusual in form and mood for Ives. It is a fast, loud crescendo. The left hand of the piano plays hard, tight staccato chords on quarter notes. From the bottom note of each chord descends a rapid sextuplet of six notes of the chromatic scale. (There are a few instances where the chord is held two or three beats, but the chromatic descent continues in those cases, descending a full 12 or even 18 notes.)

Composers most commonly use high chromatic runs to represent the whistling wind. By placing his in the bass clef Ives makes the sound more of a moan. This accords with Shelley's text, "Rough wind, that moanest loud grief too sad for song...."

The vocal line has a conventional declamatory style, in the tradition of tragic art songs. The piano's right hand is where most of the composition action is. Ives uses a kind of compositional process in this part, a two-voice canon at the unison on a two-voice subject that crosses itself so it turns into a repeated one-measure figure. As the bass hand's chord changes, the whole canon immediately shifts to a new pitch level.

Eventually a third voice for the canon is entered, then through octave doubling, by adding new notes to the bass chord, and by making the chords themselves more complex and chromatic Ives seems to destroy the tonality of the music, all the while pumping up the volume of the song.

The song is unusual in Ives in that it rises to the most dramatic, loudest moment (the two hands separating in chromatic runs—octaves descending in the left hand, parallel four-note chords ascending in the right) and there ends.

The song is not entirely convincing, emotionally. Ives seems to have responded to the drama of the poem as an opportunity to right rough, tough, "masculine" music. The song bids the wind to moan for grief, for its tears are in vain; to "wail, for the world's wrong!"

This is not an emotion that is often found in Ives' music. His music is almost entirely free of self-pity, tragedy, or representations of evil elsewhere, and he rarely yielded to despair. Nor did he have a reason to at this particular moment in his life (assuming the song really was written in 1902).

This might explain why the song seems over-wrought and artificial. Ives tries here to be a nice, conventional Romantic-era composer, which is about three things he was not.

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