Where It All Goes Down
Ah, the city. Don't you love the smell of greasy food, the garbage everywhere, the dingy apartment windows? Yeah, maybe not so much…
We begin the poem by wandering through the streets in the rain. Discarded newspapers collect around our feet, and we're surrounded by broken chimney pots and lonely horses. It's definitely time to go indoors. The exterior of the city comes inside with us, though, into interiors no less grimy. The shades are dingy and the rooms are probably small. When we finally return to the outside world, we notice that the people seem preoccupied and heartless, too busy reading the paper to notice their own souls. Finally, the poem transports us back in time to an earlier version of the city, where women gather fuel in a vacant lot. Can you say grim?
With no other details to distinguish it, the city serves as a general idea of city life, with all its garbage, grime, and, well, hopelessness. The city of "Preludes" is never identified for this reason. It could be any big city, its inhabitants could be any of us, and its hopelessness universal. It's not a vacation spot, to say the least.