Fog Carl Sandburg is an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his poetry and another for a biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Carl Sandburg “indubitably an American in ? every pulse-beat."In this poem, the poet has beautifully shown how the fog comes stealing forward just like a cat does. The poet Carl Sandburg gives a wonderful comparison between the fog and a kitten. When it arrives, it is so slow that you hardly notice it until you see or feel it. The same happens with the fog. Nobody can predict about the arrival of fog. Fog arrives quietly and engulfs the entire place and stay on for some time. It creates troubles for everyone but stays there. It is not aware of what is happening around it. Fog causes many hurdles and incidents but it does not stay at one place for a long time. As problems are over in due course of time, in the same manner fog also disappears and it becomes clear all around.POETIC DEVICES A few key literary elements in the poem are: « Rhyme Scheme * Metaphor ¢ Personification « Imagery ¢ Transferred Epithet Rhyme Scheme The poem does not have a rhyme scheme since it is written in free verse. Metaphor ¢ Sandburg extensively uses metaphors in the poem to draw comparisons between nature and a cat. ¢ In the line ‘The fog comes on little cat feet’, Sandburg has indirectly compared the fog with a cat. « He also compares the fog settled over the city to a cat sitting on its hind legs in the line ‘It sits looking over harbour and city on silent haunches and then moves on’. ¢ Inthe same line, the poet says that fog leaving the city is like a cat leaving a place quietly.Personification ¢ The words ‘It sits looking/over harbour and city’ are an example of personification. ¢ The fog, which is a thing, has been shown doing the actions of sitting and ‘looking’ here. Imagery + Sandburg uses simple words to create a vivid description of the fog. « The phrases ‘the fog comes on’, ‘sits looking’ and ‘moves on’ invoke imagery of movement in the poem. They create an image of the fog entering, settling over and, then finally moving away from the city. The phrases along with ‘little cat feet’ and ‘silent haunches’ come together to compare the actions of the fog to that of a cat. Transferred Epithet The phrase ‘on silent haunches’ is an example of transferred epithet. Here, ‘haunches’ are not ‘silent’. Rather, the phrase refers to how a cat silently sits on its back legs.