Carl Sandburg’s speaker recalls a disorienting week on the North Atlantic, wrapped in fog and mist while turbines pound through rough seas. He feels small and helpless—like a rat shaken in a dog’s teeth—cut off from stars, sun, and moon. When the ship finally reaches a Norwegian harbor, the sight of a city and its rain-coated crowds wakes a sharp hunger for streets and people.
But the poem then turns away from human company toward a deeper longing. The speaker says he would rather be water than anything else, and he asks to be buried in places where water, wind, and weather speak: a Norwegian mountain graveyard, the foggy North Atlantic, or an Illinois cornfield. The mood is misty, lonely, and reverent—not exactly sad, but full of awe for vast, elemental forces and a wish to dissolve back into them.