What is "Preludes" about by T.S. Eliot?

This poem reflects Eliot’s early poetry in the imagist tradition. He presents little vignettes almost cinematically, as though he had selected them through the process of montage. Because these vignettes represent the reverse side of life, the antiheroic nature of modern urban existence, they cause "Preludes" somewhat to resemble the view of city life presented by Swift in "A Description of the Morning."  

The images of evening in stanza one are derived from locations just outside buildings. In the second stanza the early morning images move into the thousands of furnished rooms in which urbanized human beings spend their lives. The third stanza focuses on one of these rooms in the morning, and a woman in the room is dozing before getting up to begin the day.

One may presume that the "you" in the third stanza is female because of the image of the curled papers in the hair. The images associated with this woman are "sordid," and a damnatory statement is that her "soul" is "constituted" out of a thousand such images; in other words, the negative pictures of life are more prominent than the positive. The things she sees are the shutters, the gutters, soiled hands, and the yellow soles of feet. There is nothing idealistic or pretty here.

The identity represented by "His" in line is not clear. One may assume that a general person is intended, one of the representative nonentities who live in one of the thousands of furnished rooms, one of the faceless persons in the crowd. The meaning of "blackened street" seems to be that there is much that is bad in the urban environment (it is "blackened"), but that it too needs to be active. There is a direction in the impatience to "assume the world," but it is all in the antiheroic direction.

There are not many references to the human body, but there are some. The feet are muddy, the hand is raising a dingy shade, the hair is rolled with papers, the soles of feet are yellow, and the fingers are short and square. Images of the urban scene are more abundant. Both are equally discouraging about the development of humankind.

The idea of stanza five is that there is a power somewhere which may be able to make sense out of the urban images, and that this power, through suffering, may be able to redeem the people who are consigned to the dreariness of the city. The last stanza moves from this hope to final resignation. Have your beer, wipe the foam away, and have a good time, because the world goes on in its own way despite the best any human being can do. This idea is not dissimilar to the carpe diem tradition, but it provides a twist on the theme because of the poem’s emphasis on dreariness, not on mortality.