Preludes

Part I

The speaker describes a rather dismal urban scene in the winter. The time is given precisely: It is six o’clock in the evening, and the workers are coming home from their jobs and cooking their steak dinners. They are likely lodging in a tenement house, a building divided up into cheap rental rooms or apartments. The smell of the steaks being cooked wafts into the “passageways” (Line 2) that separate the rooms. “The burnt-out ends of smoky days” (Line 4) refers to cigarette butts and the habit of smoking a lot during the day and the evening. This is clearly a lower-working-class environment. The tenement building is run-down, as suggested by the “broken blinds” (Line 10). Outside, it is raining and windy; leaves and newspapers are being blown around in the street. The leaves are “withered” (Line 7) and dirty (“grimy scraps” [Line 6]). There is nothing beautiful or appealing about them; they are part of the general detritus of the street scene, as are the newspapers blown across from “vacant lots” (Line 8)—empty fields where no one has yet built and that are likely strewn with debris of various kinds.

Although the streets and dwellings are crowded with people, the speaker does not describe any of them directly. There are no descriptions of faces. Only a collective mention of “your feet” (Line 7) is mentioned—as the people walk down the street and get caught up in the withered leaves. In other words, the people are not individualized. They go about their business as members of the anonymous masses that inhabit this unnamed industrialized city. Their presence is conveyed mainly by the smells that emanate from their quarters: Smells of cooking and stale cigarette or pipe smoke. The main active force the speaker depicts is not the people but the environment: It is the winter that “settles down” (Line 1) the rain showers and wind that wrap the leaves and “beat” (Line 9) on the blinds and chimney pots; no similar active verbs describe the activities of the people who are simply following their long-established routines.

Part II

It is now morning. Whereas in Part I the smell was of steaks cooking, the early morning smell is of stale beer as the people get out on the street and make their way to work or whatever other tasks they have in mind. The streets are covered with sawdust. In those days, restaurants and bars would put sawdust on their floors to absorb spills and dirt; people would then track the sawdust out onto the street. However, the people walking in the street still get “muddy feet” (Line 17). Again, as in Part I, only their feet are mentioned. These people are still utterly impersonal, no more differentiated than the withered leaves of Part I. They are chiefly referenced only by the smells that accompany their activities. Similarly, in the next stanza, people are represented only by their hands, which “are raising dingy shades / In a thousand furnished rooms” (Lines 22-23). In other words, this scene is just like countless others unfolding in the city as morning arrives.

Part III

There is now a change. Parts I and II have described evening and morning, respectively, but the scene the speaker imaginatively observes in Part III extends from night to morning. It also shows an identifiable person for the first time, a woman who is addressed throughout as “you”; the speaker has some general insight into her thoughts and feelings and her status in life. She is likely a sex worker. All night she lies dozing; her mind remains very active, filled with “the thousand sordid images” (Line 27) that likely reflect some of her encounters with her clients.

When dawn comes, she has a startling, albeit vague, revelation involving the people who live in the street: “You had such a vision of the street / As the street hardly understands” (Lines 33-34). This suggests a profound realization, yet the woman does not seem to be filled with excitement or a desire to convey it. She sits on the edge of the bed taking the curlers out of her hair and clasping her feet with her hands (thus providing yet another mention of hands and feet, as in Parts I and II). Her hands are soiled in some unspecified way; this may be a symbolic reference to her line of work. The yellowness of the soles of her feet may suggest ill-health of some kind.

Part IV

Late afternoon and early evening are arriving, as in Part I. The narrator introduces another individual figure, this time a man. He is presented mysteriously. The first line shows him with “[h]is soul stretched tight across the skies” (Line 39), which could suggest the crucified Christ or some other individual suffering in a similar way (See: Background). After that, the narrator describes how the skies are darkening as evening comes on, and that the same soul is obscured, too. Whatever he represents is covered over; the people are unable to see it, due to the routine activities that occupy all their attention, as described in Lines 41-45: the hurried walk home “by insistent feet” (Line 41); the filling of pipes with tobacco for the evening smoke; the evening newspapers that capture the attention; and “eyes / Assured of certain certainties” (Lines 44-45). The latter expression suggests that people do not think too deeply about their environment or their lives, which are dulled by hard work and predictable routine. They are unable to imagine anything different. The last two lines in this first stanza of Part IV return to the man whose soul is somehow stretched across the sky. It is as if he represents a deeper aspect of life on the street—he is aching to tell people about something they have missed, to be their “conscience” (Line 46) and nudge them into a larger awareness, and he does not want to wait; he is “Impatient to assume the world” (Line 47).

In the next stanza, the narrator steps forward in his own, first-person voice for the first time, acknowledging that, “I am moved by these fancies that are curled / Around these images” (Lines 48-49). He is referring to the images that describe the people—their dull, stunted routines, their mechanized lives devoid of joy or full expression of all their humanity. He is moved by their plight and sees in them “[t]he notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing” (Lines 50-61). It is a tender, compassionate vision that places the life of “the street” (Line 33) in a radically different light.

In the final stanza, the narrator dismisses the implications of his earlier statement with an ironic laugh. He takes a step back and moves onto something different, reaching back seemingly to ancient times: “The worlds revolve” (Line 53)—that is, they go around in circles. Things come and go and there is no need to get excited or moved by anything. It has all happened before and will happen again. The “ancient women” (Line 53) go back and forth “[g]athering fuel in vacant lots” (Line 54); in other words, they scavenge for whatever they can find that will sustain the lives of their families or tribe. It has all been going on for a long time and there is nothing special about it—it is the human lot.