From high above a city street, the speaker looks down and sees not faces or bodies, just a mass of hats—fifty thousand of them. The hats become a way of seeing a crowd from a distance: people reduced to moving shapes, anonymous and almost impersonal. Yet the speaker is not cold or dismissive. By asking what is under the hats and what their “high hopes” are, he wonders about the hidden lives beneath each one.
The mood is dreamlike and a little lonely. The crowd sounds alive and restless, like bees, sheep, cattle, and waterfalls, but then it falls quiet with the stillness of sea grass and prairie corn. That mix of noise and silence, city and nature, creates a sense of awe and distance—close enough to notice movement, far enough to feel separate from all those individual hopes.