Anyone can spot a metaphor. The grade-9 move is asking what it does — which qualities the poet carries across, and which ones he quietly leaves behind.
📜The Text on the Table
The fog comes on little cat feet.It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.
Carl Sandburg, “Fog” — from Chicago Poems, 1916. Public domain.
6 lines · 21 words · 2 stanzas · free verse. No rhyme, no repeating stress pattern — every bit of the rhythm comes from line breaks and sound.
Sandburg said he wrote it in about half an hour while waiting to interview a judge. English classes have been unpacking it for more than a century.
Rule 1: the poem gets the first turnRead it twice before analyzing a word
🚚A Metaphor Is a Delivery Truck
“Metaphor” comes from the Greek metapherein, “to carry across.” So the analytical question is literally a shipping question: what got loaded, and what was left on the dock?
≈SimileThe fog comes in like a cat. “Like” holds the two apart, so you stay a polite observer. Measured, controlled, distant.
=Blunt metaphorThe fog is a cat. The gap closes and it commits — but hands over the whole animal. You must mentally discard the parts that don’t fit.
🐾Sandburg’s versionOnly feet and haunches. He never even says “is.” The reader assembles the animal — so the image feels discovered, not handed over.
Personification, one participle wide:It sits looking grants the fog attention, and attention implies a mind. Weather in this poem doesn’t happen — it decides. A fog that rolls in is a meteorological fact; a fog that sits looking over harbor and city is a presence, and you are inside its field of view.
🔊Sound Is Meaning: Pace Control
Alliteration and assonance are not decoration. They control pace, and pace controls how a line feels in the reader’s body — whether the reader notices or not.
💓Meter: Counting the Heartbeat
Iambic pentameter — English poetry’s most common meter — runs five iambs per line. An iamb is one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable, so a full line is ten syllables. (Sandburg’s “Fog” has none of it; free verse is a deliberate choice too.)
Why actors care: stage-trained readers treat the stress pattern as built-in direction. When a word lands in a stressed position the sentence wouldn’t normally emphasize, that’s the playwright telling you where to lean.
🎭Tone Belongs to the Speaker. Mood Belongs to You.
Tone is the cause; mood is the effect. They often match — and the most powerful poems split them on purpose.
💬 TONE — the speaker’s attitude
Calm. Flat. Unhurried. No alarm is raised, nothing is editorialized, and no adjective runs hotter than little and silent.
Name tone with a precise adjective — wry, reverent, bitter, clinical. “Positive” and “negative” describe a thermometer, not a voice.
🌑 MOOD — what the reader feels
Unsettled. Watched. Awed, with a cold edge. Something arrives unsummoned, settles above a whole city, studies it, and leaves without explanation.
The gap between the flat tone and the eerie situation is doing most of the poem’s work.
❌Had Sandburg written “the terrifying fog,” the poem would be smaller — he would be telling you the feeling instead of causing it. That is the whole case against abstractions like “beauty” and “sadness”: concrete images persuade, announcements don’t.
📏Form, White Space & Earned Symbols
▢The stanza break is an argumentA stanza is poetry’s paragraph — lines set off by white space. In “Fog” the break falls exactly where the fog stops moving and starts sitting: 2 lines for arrival, 4 for the long still watching. The gap is a pause you are forced to take, and it lasts about as long as the fog’s decision to settle.
🔆A symbol has to be earnedAn object becomes a symbol through repetition, placement, and context — never by a reader’s hunch — and it stays fully itself while doing it. “Fog” spends four of its six lines on watching rather than on weather, which is the poem inviting you to read the fog as an enormous indifferent presence above a city that cannot affect it.
And every line break lands on a load-bearing word: comes · feet · looking · city · haunches · on. The last four words — “and then moves on” — are the hinge. Everything before them could pass for pleasant weather; that closing phrase is where the indifference lands.
🥋The Method (Works on Any Poem)
1Read it twice before you analyze a single word.
2Mark every comparison and name it precisely: metaphor, simile, personification.
3For each one, list what transfers — and what the poet deliberately withheld.
4Read it aloud and mark where your mouth speeds up or slows down.
5Look at the form: where stanzas break, where lines end, whether a meter is running underneath.
6Separate tone from mood. If they don’t match, that gap is almost certainly your best paragraph.
❌ A REACTION
“I liked it.” / “The poet uses a metaphor in line three.”
Identification is the first ten seconds of analysis, not the job.
✅ ANALYSIS
“Sandburg withholds the word cat so the reader assembles the animal, which makes the fog’s arrival feel discovered rather than announced.”
Line, device, effect. That is the sentence an English 9 essay is built on.
🔑Key Terms
🚚MetaphorA comparison asserting one thing IS another, transferring qualities without “like” or “as.” Analysis names both terms and both lists — what crosses and what doesn’t.
⚖SimileA comparison that keeps two things visibly separate with “like” or “as.” The gap stays open, so it feels measured; a metaphor closes the gap and commits.
🌩PersonificationGiving human traits — intention, emotion, a body, a will — to something nonhuman. Ask what the poem gains from an object that chooses.
👀ImageryLanguage that recreates sensory experience: sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, plus temperature and motion. Concrete images persuade; abstractions only announce.
🔆SymbolismA concrete object that also stands for a larger idea while remaining fully itself. Earned by repetition, placement, and context.
💬AlliterationThe same consonant sound repeated at the start of nearby stressed words. It binds words into one unit — and changes pace.
🎵AssonanceThe same vowel sound repeated inside nearby words, whatever consonants surround them. Long vowels stretch a line; short vowels clip it.
💓MeterThe regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, measured in feet. Iambic pentameter = five iambs = ten syllables.
▢StanzaA group of lines set off by white space — poetry’s paragraph. Where the break falls is an authorial choice that carries meaning.
🎭Tone / MoodTone is the speaker’s attitude (the cause). Mood is the atmosphere created in the reader (the effect). Split them and you have a paragraph.
🌍The Stakes Outside the Poem
📢Advertising & political speechCalling a policy “a lifeline” instead of “a handout” changes not one dollar in it — it changes which qualities get carried across. One image makes the recipient a drowning person you’d be monstrous not to help; the other makes them someone with a hand out. Naming the transfer out loud is how you stop being moved by a comparison you never agreed to.
🩺Medicine & science writingDNA as “code,” the immune system “fighting,” a patient “battling” cancer. Each metaphor clarifies something and conceals something — “battling” frames illness as a contest you could lose by not trying hard enough, which is both false and cruel. Health-communication researchers now audit these metaphors on purpose.
📌Remember This
1Identifying a device is the first ten seconds, not the job. Credit comes from naming the two things compared, which qualities transfer, which the poet withholds, and what the poem gains that a plain sentence would lose.
2Sound is meaning. Alliteration, assonance, and meter control pace, and pace controls how a line feels in the reader’s body.
3Tone belongs to the speaker; mood belongs to you. A calm, factual tone describing a catastrophe produces a far more disturbing mood than any amount of shouting.
🤔 Think about it
Sandburg could have written “the fog comes in slowly and quietly, then leaves.” Exactly the same information. Name precisely what is lost when the cat disappears — and be honest about whether anything is gained.
Every metaphor hides as much as it reveals. Pick one you use without thinking — “crushing” a test, “falling” in love, “battling” an illness, “scrolling” a feed — and work out what that image quietly makes invisible.
⭐Remember: line, device, effect. Quote the line, name the move, then say what the move does to a reader. “I liked it” is a reaction; that three-part sentence is analysis.
✏️ ClickClass Anchor Chart · Stretch English 9 · Poetry & Figurative Language