Thursday Trivia: Little Cat Feet

There's not much of a mystery surrounding today's phrase. But I love its descriptive qualities so much that I wanted to share it with you.

And I have run into a few people who didn't know its origin, so I quickly grabbed at this as an excuse to post about it!

"Little cat feet" was made famous in the early 20th century by poet Carl Sandburg, when he used those words to describe the quiet manner in which fog can come drifting in over a harbor.

No one models cat feet better than our feline fashionista, Allie

For those of us trapped in winter's Polar Vortex, I argue that the same can be said of snow! (Minus the plows, snowblowers and shovels, of course.)  There's something very sound deadening and silent about a blanket of snow as it falls and envelops the world in white.

And lest I appear to be waxing poetic about the deep freeze that has held those of us in the U.S. and Canada firmly in its grip, just so we're clear: we are SO over it!

We leave you today with Carl Sandburg's Fog, first published in an anthology of modern poetry in 1919:

"Fog

By Carl Sandburg

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent hanches

and then moves on."

The oldest cat feet in recorded history? They were found in an archaeological dig in India in 1943, called the Chanhu-Daro Excavations. Click here for a photo of these ancient pawprints!

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Sources:

Bibliographic record: Louis Untermeyer, ed. Modern American Poetry. 1919. Harcourt, Brace and Howe.
Wikipedia
Bartleby
Poetry Foundation