Walking down Fifth Avenue, the speaker finds not a lively city street but a dead, cramped ravine. The buildings are forced together like unhappy companions, their sharp angles and straight lines reduced to something stifled and rebellious. They become hollow faces with gaping mouths, or carved Gothic clichés stained with a deathly color. Even sunlight feels wrong, as if it is exposing a grave rather than warming the street. People rushing by are only accidental shadows, and their hard noises briefly numb the speaker before fading back into a deeper silence. The whole avenue feels haunted and unreal, ruled by a quiet presence of death beneath its surface. The mood is bleak, alienated, and claustrophobic—an image of urban wealth hollowed out into something corpse-like. What stays with the reader is the sense of a famous street turned into a mausoleum. Life keeps moving, but it feels like a procession of ghosts.
Fifth Avenue — Summary
Seasons bring nothing to this gulch Save a harshly intimate anecdote Scrawled, here and there, on paint and stone. The houses shoulder each other In a forced and passionless communion. Their harassed angles rise Like a violent picture-puzzle Hiding a story that only ruins could reveal; Their straight lines, robbed of power, Meet in dwarfed rebellion. Sometimes they stand like vastly flattened faces Suffering ants to crawl In and out of their gaping mouths. Sometimes, in menial attitudes They stand like Gothic platitudes Slipshodly carved in dark brown stone. Tarnished solemnities of death Cast their transfigured hue on this avenue. The cool and indiscriminate glare Of sunlight seems to desecrate a tomb, And the racing people seem A stream of accidental shadows. Hard noises strike one’s face and make It numb with momentary reality, But the noiseless undertone returns And they change to unreal jests Made by death.