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Summary, Interpretation: The speaker invites the listener to walk with him into the streets on an evening that resembles a patient, anesthetized with ether, lying on the table of a hospital operating room. (Until recent times, physicians used ether—a liquid obtained by combining sulfuric acid and ethyl alcohol—to render patients unconscious before an operation.) The imagery suggests that the evening is lifeless and listless. The speaker and the listener will walk through lonely streets—the business day has ended—past cheap hotels and restaurants with sawdust on the floors. (Sawdust was used to absorb spilled beverages and food, making it easy to sweep up at the end of the day.) The shabby establishments will remind the speaker of his own shortcomings, their images remaining in his mind as he walks on. They will then prod the listener to ask the speaker a question about the speaker's life—perhaps why he visits these seedy haunts, which are symbols of his life, and why he has not acted to better himself or to take a wife.
Allusion, overwhelming question (line 10): Eliot appears to have borrowed this phrase from James Fenimore Cooper's 1823 novel, The Pioneers, one of five novels that make up The Leatherstocking Tales (1823-1841), about life on the frontier in early America. When he was a youth, Eliot read and enjoyed The Pioneers. In the novel, one of the characters, Benjamin, asks a series of questions ending with the "overwhelming question." Following is the passage:
.......“Did’ee ever see a British ship, Master Kirby? an English line-of-battle ship, boy? Where did’ee ever fall in with a regular built vessel, with starn-post and cutwater, gar board-streak and plank-shear, gangways, and hatchways, and waterways, quarter-deck, and forecastle, ay, and flush-deck?—tell me that, man, if you can; where away did’ee ever fall in with a full-rigged, regular-built, necked vessel?”
.......The whole company were a good deal astounded with this overwhelming question, and even Richard afterward remarked that it “was a thousand pities that Benjamin could not read, or he must have made a valuable officer to the British marine.