Late at night, the speaker rides a clattering streetcar through rain and mist, watching the city pass in a drowsy haze. The headlight cuts through the cold rain and finds the road, but everything else feels soaked and drained of life.
Then the only human figure appears: an old woman, bloated, disheveled, and bleared, huddled in a doorway to sleep. She is homeless. The phrase “far-wandered waif of other days” makes her seem like a leftover from an earlier, kinder time, now forgotten. The mood is weary, cold, and quietly bleak. The streetcar has a path forward; the woman does not. The poem captures a brief, lonely glimpse of someone the city has left behind.