Fog

Fog is a cloudlike mass that limits visibility. In Sadburg’s “Fog”, Sandburg uses personification to give the lingering mass of humidity and blurriness the ability to crawl on “little cat feet” and sit, lingering, and then move on. The human qualities that encompass it give fog the importance of anything human. In other words, fog is of vital importance.

The way Sandburg describes it as coming, lingering, and eventually moving on, it becomes a metaphor for whatever happens to cloud our minds, making us stumble and rendering us disoriented, in the same way everyday problems and obstacles seem to affect as.

The structure of the poem goes along with its overall meaning, a couplet correctly interpreting the “little cat feet” as well as the quickness with which it comes, and the other stanza, a quatrain, signaling the staggering lethargic pace with which humans let their problems engulf the, and the time it takes them to overcome them, or deal with them, to the point where they eventually fade away.