The speaker talks to a street pavement as though it were a tired, unresisting person. It has been cut, stained, scuffed, and walked over by endless feet with “maniac insistence.” The mood is gritty and urban, but also oddly intimate: the pavement seems humiliated, yet strangely patient.
The final lines shift the tone. Instead of pitying the pavement, the speaker urges it to keep a “passive insolence” toward the people who trample it. From the ground, those busy walkers look like dwarfs. That last line—“Only one who lies upon his back / Can disregard the stars”—suggests that being low and still can bring a strange freedom. The pavement’s refusal to struggle becomes a quiet kind of power, detached from human ambition.