Symbol Analysis
The poem returns, again and again, to imagery of litter and filth. Eliot begins the poem by describing the city as "burnt out," "smoky" and full of "grimy scraps, " but he doesn't leave the dirt on the streets. In stanza 2, we can smell the stale beer from the inside of our apartment, where we contemplate our neighbors raising their "dingy shades." The grime follows us even further inside in stanza 3, where our hands, feet, and even our souls are described as "soiled" or "sordid." Eliot connects the literal dirt of the city to the figurative dirt within us, and seems to indicate that this grime is hard to escape.