Fog by Carl Sandburg

Full Text

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Overview

In just six lines, Sandburg creates one of the most famous extended metaphors in American poetry: fog as a cat that arrives silently, observes, and departs. The poem is a model of imagist compression.

Line-by-Line Analysis

Lines 1-2

The fog's arrival is rendered through a single physical detail: "little cat feet." The adjective "little" domesticates a vast weather phenomenon, making it intimate and unthreatening.

Lines 3-6

The cat-fog sits on its haunches — a posture of patient observation, not action. It surveys harbor and city (the commercial and human worlds), then leaves. The verb "moves on" has a cat's indifference: it came, it looked, it left without caring.

Themes

• Nature and the urban world
• Transience
• Quiet observation
• Imagist compression

Literary Devices

Extended metaphor

The fog comes / on little cat feet — The entire poem sustains a single comparison between fog and a cat, never breaking the conceit.

Personification

It sits looking / over harbor and city — The fog is given animal agency — it looks, it sits, it moves on — transforming weather into a creature with intentions.

Imagism

on silent haunches — Sandburg follows the imagist principle of direct treatment — no abstraction, no commentary, just the image presented cleanly.

Enjambment

It sits looking / over harbor and city — The line break after "looking" creates a momentary pause that mimics the fog's own stillness before the eye sweeps across the landscape.

Historical Context

Published in Chicago Poems in 1916, this is one of the defining works of the American imagist movement. Sandburg reportedly wrote it in response to seeing fog roll into Chicago's harbor. The poem's brevity was radical for its time.