Stanza 2 Summary

Get out the microscope, because we’re going through this poem line-by-line.

The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press

We have returned to the city in the morning, which is just "coming to consciousness" (and here we get more personification since mornings aren't really conscious).
It's not such a lovely morning, though; there's the smell of stale beer and the traces of muddy footprints from the city's many inhabitants. Yuck.
Oh, and don't forget the sawdust. All in all, it's a smelly, dirty morning. And because of the enjambment of these lines, all the lovely smells, sights, and sounds are assaulting our senses at once.
Talk about a rude awakening.

To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,

Well hey, at least there's coffee. And we might need it, because the poem starts to get a little less literal and a little more figurative in lines 19-20. It's time to up the brain power.
So, a "masquerade" is a costumed dance and here "time" is the one throwing this dance. Now what's that all about?
Perhaps our speaker means that time isn't real; it's an illusion, like a mask. (We can say that the idea of time-as-illusion is an idea he'll pursue again and again in his later work. Check out "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" for one example.)
Let's read on to see if there's more on this metaphor.

One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

The speaker considers how, every morning, all of the people of the city raise their shades to let in the light. It's not necessarily a lovely thought, though; the shades are "dingy."
Thinking about how people in the city live seems to depress the speaker, or maybe the people themselves are depressed by the idea that everyone is doing the same thing at once, day in and day out.
So there's the reason behind calling time a masquerade: if we always do the same things every day, it is like time never passes. Nothing ever really changes, says the speaker.
They seem to find the monotony of these small actions to be pretty sad. Where's the joy, where's the excitement?
Maybe it's in stanza 3? Let's find out…