In “Morning at the Window,” T. S. Eliot is looking down at a foggy street and it’s the brown fog itself that seems to throw up to him “Twisted faces from the bottom of the street, / And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts / An aimless smile that hovers in the air / And vanishes along the level of the roofs.”

We’ve all seen faces in clouds, and what Eliot is showing us here is a real human face which is then, in the imagination of the poet, duplicated in the fog, the fog then drifting high, taking the face with it. The smile of the face is aimless to match the aimless drifting of the fog upon which it is carried.

One thing I like about this poem is the possibility that the poet didn’t in fact see on this occasion any actual human faces at all: all he sees is fog, he can’t see through it and he merely imagines the people down there, their faces twisted in just the kind of way a melancholy poet might imagine them to twist.