"The Winter Evening Settles Down" is the first part of T.S. Eliot's "Preludes." It consists of thirteen lines written in free verse, with an irregular rhyme scheme and meter. The lengths of the lines, and their inclusion or omission of rhyme, correlate with the message and mood each line is intended to convey. "Six o'clock," for example, is an isolated line, the shortest in the poem; this gives it an impact not unlike the sound of a clock sounding out six o'clock. It is an interruption to the rest of the poem and its world. Eliot uses colorful language to evoke various senses: the "smell of steaks" and the "burnt-out" "smoky" neighborhood can be felt, as well as imagined.

Eliot uses language, too, to create a semantic field of the "burnt-out" and the dried-up: the neighborhood is "withered," "vacant," "broken," and "lonely." One can imagine the sensation of leaves as they "wrap" around "your" feet—note Eliot's use of the second-person to directly address the reader, drawing them into the desolate scene. Everything in the poem builds this sense of the worn-out neighborhood, leading to the climactic pause at the end, before the final line announces "the lighting of the lamps." This caesura, coupled with the rhyme, suggests that the lighting of the lamps occasions some shift in the neighborhood, as in the poem, casting a light over matters and somehow shifting the sense of things. As six o'clock sounds, the lamps are lit, and the mood of the neighborhood subtly changes.

In this poem, the speaker describes a winter evening. It is dinner time, and one can smell the steaks people are eating for their supper. The narrator describes the "burnt-out ends of smoky days," as though the evening is the ashen-gray leavings of a used-up cigarette: hardly a desirable or hopeful image. Then a rain shower comes, its wind pushing "grimy scraps / Of withered leaves about [one's] feet" and discarded newspapers with old news across empty parking lots. Everyone has gone home and the winter evening is deserted. The rain continues, falling on a rather dilapidated neighborhood with run-down homes. A single horse, all alone, stamps its feet and breathes steam in the chill air. Then, there is a break separating the final line form the rest: "And then the lighting of the lamps."

Throughout the poem's first twelve lines, the speaker paints a rather dreary picture of a winter evening in the city. It feels deserted, with everyone inside in their own homes. The evening feels "burnt-out" and the surroundings are "grimy" and "withered"; buildings are grungy and shabby, and garbage is strewn about. Even the horse is "lonely." This is a pretty bleak picture of modern life in the city until the very end, when the mood turns. There seems to be something hopeful about the lighting of the lamps. Lamplight has a way of turning gray and wet into pretty and glistening. Light, itself, is almost always associated with something hopeful. Perhaps the night hides much of the grime and shadiness, making night in the city seem more lovely and hopeful than it does during the day.