From the sixteenth floor, the speaker watches and listens to the city at night. The noise rises like smoke through narrow streets, grates against the marble fronts of buildings, and makes them gleam in the lamplight. The streets echo with sound, but it is all impersonal and mechanical.
Then the poem turns on a single absence: the speaker cannot hear the voice of someone they love. Without that voice, the city’s noise becomes incoherent and trivial. The speaker’s brain aches with emptiness. The mood is one of lonely detachment—being above the busy world only makes the silence feel sharper, as if all that urban energy is meaningless when the one desired connection is missing.