Fog — Summary

Carl Sandburg’s “Fog” turns the fog into a cat. It arrives without warning, “on little cat feet,” so the change in the weather feels soft and quiet rather than alarming. Once it settles in, it sits above the harbor and city “on silent haunches,” watching but making no sound, before it slips away. The speaker seems calm and observant, almost amused by the comparison, not threatened by the fog at all. That gives the poem a hushed, mysterious mood—everything is still, blurred, and a little dreamlike. Because the poem is only six lines long, it also feels like the fog itself: brief, quiet, and gone almost as soon as it appears.