The winter evening
The winter evening experiences an orderly transition from day to night through the smells of dinner being cooked.
"You"
The poem uses the second person to address a pedestrian in the first prelude whose feet get covered in the detritus of withered leaves and scraps of newspaper.
In the third prelude, it is a woman with insomnia and visions who is addressed in the second person.
A cabhorse
A lonely creature, steaming with warmth on a cold rainy evening, stamping with impatience.
The morning
The morning wakes up in the second prelude with of the smell of stale beer from the night before.
One
A thinking subject in the second prelude, who has a hyperbolic vision of uniformity of the city.
Him/Christ
The fourth prelude refers obliquely to Christ when it describes "His soul stretched tight across the skies"; He is also described as an “infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.”
