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Fog and The Trees are two of the ten First Flight poems that CBSE lists for Class 10 English Language and Literature in 2026-27, according to the CBSE curriculum document for subject code 184. Each runs on one big comparison, and each is easy marks once you can say what that comparison does.
What does Fog by Carl Sandburg mean, line by line?
Read the poem in NCERT's First Flight. Its six lines picture fog arriving on a cat's small feet, settling on its haunches to look over the harbour and the city, and then moving on.
The arrival. Fog arrives quietly, the way a cat walks in without a sound.
The fog sits and looks: “it” is the fog. It settles over port and town like a cat sitting still, watching.
“on silent haunches”: NCERT's glossary gives “on haunches” as “sitting with knees bent”. A cat sits this way, alert but calm.
“and then moves on.” Fog lifts without warning, as a cat wanders off when it has had enough.
Sandburg never writes “the fog is like a cat”, which is why this is a metaphor and not a simile. First Flight says a metaphor compares two things by giving one of them a feature of the other (NCERT). The poem has no rhyme scheme either; NCERT calls poetry without an obvious rhythm or rhyme “free verse”.
Curious how real fog forms? The Fermi Concept Library has a lesson for every concept in physics and chemistry.
What happens in The Trees by Adrienne Rich?
The NCERT chapter prints the poem in three stanzas, with a note that Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1929 and is described as a feminist and a radical poet.
Stanza 1. The trees kept inside a house are moving out into the forest. Until now that forest was empty: no bird could sit, no insect hide, no sun rest its feet in shade. By morning it will be full.
Stanza 2. All night the roots work free of cracks in the veranda floor, leaves strain toward the glass, and “long-cramped” boughs shuffle under the roof, like newly discharged patients moving half-dazed to the clinic doors.
Stanza 3. The speaker sits inside writing long letters that barely mention the forest leaving. At first the whole moon shines and the smell of leaves and lichen reaches the rooms “like a voice”. Then the glass breaks, the trees stumble forward into the night, and the moon is “broken like a mirror”, its pieces flashing in the crown of the tallest oak.
The moon changes from whole to broken because the trees are now outside, so it is seen in pieces through their branches. Note the three similes (patients, voice, mirror): The Trees uses “like”, Fog never does.
What does the trees moving out really mean?
NCERT's own questions in the chapter offer two suggestions. The first is a conflict between people and nature: are plants and trees used for “interior decoration” in cities while forests are cut down “imprisoned”, needing to “break out”? NCERT asks you to compare this with A Tiger in the Zoo. The second: Rich has been known to use trees as a metaphor for human beings, a recurrent image in her poetry.
If you take the trees as people, one possible reading, which fits the book's note calling Rich a feminist poet, is that they are people leaving a life that cramped them. The speaker's near-silence in her letters shows how hard such a change can be to talk about, a point NCERT's questions also raise. Either reading earns marks if you back it with a line from the poem.
How do you answer Fog and The Trees questions in the board exam?
The CBSE 2026-27 curriculum sets one poetry extract out of two for 5 marks, and First Flight short answers of 40-50 words (four out of five, 3 marks each). A strong short answer has three parts: the point, the line, and what the line shows.
Worked example. How does Sandburg show that the fog is like a cat?
Answer: Sandburg uses a metaphor, never the word “like”. The fog comes “on little cat feet”, silently, as a cat appears. It “sits looking” over harbour and city “on silent haunches”, calm and watchful, and then “moves on” suddenly, the way an independent cat leaves when it chooses.
That is 47 words. Before the exam, check you can do these from memory:
Say what “it” in line 3 of Fog refers to.
Explain why Fog is free verse.
Name three things that cannot happen in a forest without trees.
Describe the moon at the start and end of stanza 3, and say why it changes.
Give both NCERT readings of The Trees, with one line for each.
Next, practise checking figures of speech in NCERT poems, borrow the method from this poem appreciation guide, and pace the paper with a minute-per-mark plan for board exams.
