Jump to the poem’s last word and you see that the poet has begun with one word – haze – and ended with one word – hail. He has sandwiched his poem between these two words, as if to underline the fact that he intends here only to capture one strictly limited set of moments – those moments that occur between (the curtain rises) heat and (the curtain falls) hail, between the hot build-up to a storm and the outbreak of the storm on a summer afternoon in New York. The words are monosyllabic, four letters, starting with h. This simplicity deepens our sense of the speaker as someone stunned by the weather into almost trance-like invocation, a kind of passive registering rather than active responding. And stunned by something else.

A man and a woman on a bench:
she tells him he must be psychic,
for how else could he sense, even before she knew,
that she’d need to call it off?

Let us say that the speaker of the poem is the man who, amid this hot and crowded urban scene, is being dumped by his lover. The poem is not just a recording consciousness; it is a wounded and perplexed consciousness, for whom the oppressive weather and the random action are a rough equivalent of his depressed awareness and his sense of the wounding contingency of life events.

A bicyclist
fumes by with a coach’s whistle clamped
hard between his teeth, shrilling like a teakettle
on the boil.

Heat. The metaphor is nicely extended via the boiling teakettle whistle on the bicyclist; but we can also read this as an objective correlative of the fevered rage within the poem’s speaker as his lover dismisses him.

I never meant, she says.
But I thought, he replies. Two cabs almost
collide; someone yells fuck in Farsi.

Life as mischance, as accident, misunderstanding, almost-thereness, near-misses, miscomprehension … The theme is clear enough in relation to the lovers (But I thought…); it is amplified in the larger setting of almost-collisions and obscure, aggressive use of language.

I’m sorry, she says. The comforts
of loneliness fall in like a bad platoon.

This is a slovenly, random world, inside and out, so that when the speaker finally understands what has happened to him – he has been deserted, and will now be lonely – he feels the impact of that wound as one more undisciplined, hazy, thick, painted over thing in his world.

The sky blurs — there’s a storm coming
up or down. A lank cat slinks liquidly
around a corner.

Is his coming emotional storm going to be cathartic (up) or catastrophic (down)? Who knows? Everything is blurred. That meager, lank cat is the speaker, hollowed out by lovelessness, about to rise and slink through the next phase of his life.

How familiar
it feels to feel strange, hollower
than a bassoon.

So here the poet reveals himself fully. He indeed seems to have been not merely an observer of an urban scene in the summer but the devastated man on the bench who has been (the way one will as trauma is unfolding) looking at the world around him, his perceptions and descriptions of it marked, tinged, tainted, by his melancholy, anger, and shock. As with the wounded, confused, passive speaker in Prufrock, whose opening lines describe a hazy night in a city with lots of cats, the speaker here finds himself in an all too objectively correlative miasma of mystery and pain and foreboding. The speaker’s identity turns out to be too weak to compete with his complex, powerful, and painful world. He is simply hollowed out by it all – a hollow man. Recall the violists at the beginning of the poem – the poet is just the opposite of the ringing strings of that instrument.