The narrator, or speaker, of T.S. Eliot's "Preludes" is not named. However, we can infer a few things about the speaker's identity.

In the second-to-last stanza, the speaker slips into a first-person point of view. "I am moved by fancies," he says. He seems, however, to have an omniscient insight into the scenes he describes. He knows, for example, that the cab-horse feels "lonely" and that the night "reveal[s]/ The thousand sordid images/ Of which your soul" is made. The speaker also has the ability to transcend time and place, returning in the end to a time when "ancient women" gathered "fuel" as a part of daily life.

The speaker is dismayed by the suffering which seems pervasive to the human experience. Morning is not described as a time of hope and promise but instead as a time when people are forced into "consciousness" amid the "faint stale smells of beer" and "press" their way to "early coffee-stands." Time "resumes" each day, but the daily monotony of hardship manifests in nights filled with those things which torment the human soul. The speaker is resigned to his place in this world and the "certain certainties" of suffering that continue, day after day.