Five times the poem tells us the street is empty. The sixth time, in the very last line, the word is gone, replaced by "crowded". That one swap is where the poem's feeling lands. A dreamer walks down a deserted street, hears crying but sees no one, calls out and gets no answer, then finds an old picture of the same street full of smiling people. The central idea is the ache of what a place has lost, and the gap between how things were and how they are. The poem never says why the people have gone. A reader might think of a neighbourhood that has changed, or of friends who have drifted away. That is an inference, because the text keeps its reasons to itself.
The construction is built on echo. Each stanza's first line ends on a word that the next line picks up: "walking, / Walking on an empty street," then "crying, / Crying on this empty street." The pattern comes back in "no one, / No people" and "no response, / No response," and again in "smiling, / Smiling." It works like footsteps, each line stepping into the print of the one before, and it gives the poem a dreamlike stutter, as if the mind keeps circling the same spot. Every even line also ends on "street". This isn't rhyme in the usual sense, since the poem has no matching sounds, only the same word returning. But it does what rhyme does, tying the lines together, and here the "rhyme" never changes, which suits a dream the speaker can't escape.
The rhythm supports this. The lines are short, mostly seven or eight syllables, and they fall naturally into a trochaic beat: WALK-ing ON an EMP-ty STREET. The stress lands on "street" every time, like a heavy footfall at the end of each sentence. Because the pattern is so steady, the final line, "Smiling on a crowded street," has almost exactly the same rhythm as the second. The form stays the same and only the word changes, which makes the change hit harder.
The senses are handled carefully. In the first stanza the speaker only hears: people are crying, but nobody is there. The second stanza tries sight and voice together with "I looked around" and "I called out". Both are active, hopeful verbs, and both fail. By the third stanza the speaker is "Looking down", a lowered gaze that suggests defeat, though that is an interpretation rather than something the poem states. Then comes the cruel arrangement. Crying is heard without faces, and smiles are seen without sound. A photograph is silent, so the happy people can't be heard, and the unhappy ones can't be seen. Sound and sight never meet, and neither half of the crowd can be reached.
Small words matter too. The street is "an empty street" only once. From the fourth line on it is always "this empty street", as though the speaker has recognised it. When the picture arrives, it is "an old picture of this empty street," so the crowd and the emptiness belong to the same place at different times. "Old" is the quiet pivot of the poem. The smiling crowd is not only absent but in the past, and the only place it survives is on paper. The title's plural, "Empty Streets", may hint that this emptiness is bigger than one road, though the poem itself only ever shows one.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. The vocabulary is plain, there are no elaborate metaphors, and the speaker never says "I felt lonely" or "I missed them". The emotion comes from the repetition, the word "empty" piling up until "crowded" sounds almost like a wound. The poem also ends without comfort. The speaker doesn't act on the picture or wake up, and the crowd stays out of reach. It shows how a simple structure, pushed hard in one direction and then turned by a single word, can leave a reader with the feeling of an emptier street than the poem ever describes.