Rain, slate roofs, railway lines and scrap metal: the poem builds a landscape where almost everything is grey. The speaker describes rain falling like long fingers through weak storm light, then moves outward to rooftops, doves, gutters, cranes in the clouds, cooling towers and heaps of discarded steel. It's a bleak, industrial scene, though the cranes and doves bring a little movement and grace.
What makes the poem stand out is its sound. Nearly every line repeats the hard "gr" sound: grey, graced, graven, gracefully, grazing, graveyards, grating. The words scrape against each other, and the effect is a little like the weather itself, dense and unrelenting.
In the last lines the poem turns to the reader. The words on the page become a "grating" and the print is "ingrained with grey," so the colour seems to seep from the landscape into the act of reading. The mood is quiet, heavy and a bit melancholy, but also carefully crafted, as if the speaker finds a strange beauty in all that dullness.