Follow in the footsteps of the kitten,
The fog is coming.
It sits quietly.
Look at that port
Look at this city.
Then walk away.
(Translated by Li Wenjun)
Carl Sandberg (United States)
Fog was inadvertently written by the author while waiting for the judge in the reception room of juvenile court. Poetry is very popular after publication, and it is often selected into various poetry collections or composed into songs, becoming "the highest paid American poetry by word count". (Zhao Yiheng: Selected Poems of Modern America, 1985 Foreign Literature Publishing House)
This poem was written in 19 16. At that time, American poetry was at the turn of the old and the new. On the one hand, it continues to be full of traditional poems that are moaning and divorced from reality. On the other hand, the Imagist Poetry Movement rose. Carl sandburg's poetry is like another breeze blowing into the world of poetry. On the basis of Whitman's free style, he absorbed imagism, oriental poetry and folk songs, expressed the theme that was considered impossible to enter poetry in the spoken language of contemporary workers, praised American industrial civilization and reproduced the voice and color of big cities. Fog embodies carl sandburg's style to some extent. From the subject matter, it depicts the foggy scene of Chicago, reproduces the rare quiet and unknown moment of this large industrial city in the midwest of the United States, and reveals the author's sincere feelings for modern American industrial civilization. In terms of artistic style, although carl sandburg is not an Imagist poet, his poems have always been regarded as typical Imagist masterpieces, which also shows the diversity of the poet's styles. Fog does have the characteristics of image poetry expressing intuitive impression, keen and novel observation, concise language and musical rhythm. The whole poem is a concrete imitation of the poet's instant impression of morning fog, which causes readers to associate with the fog color hanging over the city and port, but the poet's feelings are not directly revealed; It uses the "kitten's footsteps" as a metaphor for the morning fog, with a strange perspective and fresh image, which gives people a refreshing feeling; The sentence pattern of the poem adopts Whitman's freestyle without rhyme, which is shorter, more plain and more colloquial than Whitman's sentence pattern. The syllables of the poem are highly concise, almost the same as the five, seven and five syllables of Japanese haiku poems. Imagist poets at that time (such as Pound and Amy Rochel) often wrote poems imitating haiku syllables, and carl sandburg was obviously influenced. He himself said, "When it comes to fog, I am always immersed in Japanese haiku poems." (Harry Gordon: Carl Sandberg, 196 1 World Publishing Company) Critics also pointed out: "The technique of fog comes from Carl Sandberg's admiration for the imagism achievements of Japanese haiku." (Joseph Haas, etc. : Biography of Carl Sandberg, 1967, new york Edition) The rhythm of the poem is full of inherent musical beauty. Although it doesn't rhyme, in just 20 syllables, there are more than a dozen sweet "flowing clouds" and soft fricative sounds intertwined, which just shows the artistic conception of fog gently circling the cage.