“Little Red Cap” is the opening poem of Carol Ann Duffy’s 1999

collection “The World’s Wife”. Each of the thirty poems in this book takes
as its theme a character from history, mythology or popular culture and
gives it a feminist treatment, usually by telling the untold story of the
woman in the life of a male character.
“Little Red Cap” does not follow this pattern, in that the character is
“Little Red Riding Hood” from the story by the Brothers Grimm, brought
up to date by being the mouthpiece of the poet herself. The name of the
character is a direct translation of the name used in the original story, but
the name has another connotation in that “Red Caps” is the name given
familiarly to the Royal Military Police of the British Army.  Anyone who
knows this is therefore likely to expect that this young lady is a girl with
attitude who is not to be messed with.

Discussion
The poem comprises seven stanzas, each of six unrhymed but mostly
regular lines (in iambic pentameter). Duffy makes considerable use of
run-on lines to connect the stanzas, with only the first stanza being
“standalone”. Many of the lines also run on to the next, which gives the
poem a constant forward movement as the story is told.
The first three words, “At childhood’s end”, set the scene immediately.
This is to be a poem about the loss of innocence, which is also an
interpretation that is often given to the original tale. The autobiographical
elements of the poem are also clear at the outset, in that the elements of
the “border country” between town and woods are the same as those of
Duffy’s own experience of growing up in Stafford, a market town in the
north Midlands of England.
The girl meets the wolf, not at her grandmother’s house, but in the
woods, where he “stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud / in
his wolfy drawl”. This is another autobiographical reference, because
Carol Ann Duffy, at the age of sixteen, had paid a visit to Liverpool
where she attended a poetry reading given by Adrian Henri, who was
her senior by 23 years.
The line “In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me, / sweet
sixteen, never been, …” is factually true. Duffy and Henri became firm
friends and then lovers, living together for twelve years. It is also true
that Duffy wanted to be ensnared by this “wolf” whose poetry was so
different from what she had already composed but which was deeply
attractive to her. Hence: “The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the
woods, / away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place … ”
There are also strong hints of sexual attraction, conveyed by lines such
as: “my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer /
snagged on twig and branch” (with references both to lost virginity and
her schoolgirl status) and the less subtle: “I clung till dawn to his
thrashing fur”.
Little Red Cap then offers her poetry in response, a “living bird – white
dove” but this is rejected as it flies “from my hands to his open mouth. /
One bite, dead”.
On exploring the wolf’s lair, she discovers a wonderful world of books
and words: “Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head, /
warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood”. This vast treasury of
poetry is there to be consumed and exploited, which is a message for
any budding poet in that it is impossible to succeed at one’s craft unless
one is thoroughly in tune with what that craft is.
However, in time she comes to realise that she must seek a voice of her
own, and it must be one that is not swallowed whole by the first available
wolf. As she says: “it took ten years / in the woods to tell … / … that a
greying wolf / howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out …”
She wants to sing a new song.
In order to create, she must first perform acts of violence that equal
those of the wolf: “I took an axe / to a willow to see how it wept. I took an
axe to a salmon / to see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf / as he
slept …” These acts are creative because they have a purpose, like a
scientific dissection that requires the subject to be dead before it can
yield its secrets.
With the last of these attacks the autobiography returns to the original
story in the final stanza, with the traditional opening up of the wolf to find
the swallowed grandmother inside and the placing of stones in his
stomach after which he is “stitched ... up” both literally and
metaphorically. The reason for doing this in the Brothers Grimm story is
to weigh the wolf down so that he cannot chase the girl when he wakes
up. In the poem, this is how the girl poet can finally escape from the
older poet’s influence, leading to the poem’s concluding line: “Out of the
forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone”.
The question that must often be asked with Carol Ann Duffy’s poems is,
how literally should the reader take them? This is a particularly pertinent
question with the poems in “The World’s Wife” because there is clearly a
very playful element about them, and she is re-telling old stories that can
in any case be interpreted in various ways. With “Little Red Cap” it might
seem that, by giving Adrian Henri the character of the “big bad wolf”, she
is painting him in a hostile light and that she regarded him as a threat
from which she had to escape.
However, it would be a mistake to draw too many inferences of that kind
from the poem. As mentioned above, Duffy and Henri were always very
good friends, and she was with him on the day that he died in December
2000. In an interview in 2010 she made it clear that she was “just playing
around with the story. It’s not necessarily how it was.”
On the other hand, it is true that Duffy sought to find her own voice and
thus had to escape from the wolf that is the poetry of others. If Adrian
Henri is the wolf, then it is Henri the poet as opposed to Henri the man
who fulfils that role.
Another theme that runs through the poem is a feminist one. Male
poetry, as represented by the wolf’s books that are “crimson, gold,
aglow”, is contrasted by the “white dove” that she produces and which
the wolf destroys, and also by her idea of words having wings, such that
“birds are the uttered thoughts of trees”.
“Lesson one” from the wolf had been a love poem that came with a
price, namely a sexual one, but the girl felt the need to slide “from
between his heavy matted paws” to find her own, female, voice.
It is also to be noted that the voice she finds does not come out of thin
air but is part of a long tradition of female writing to which she needs to
become attuned. The apprenticeship she gains from the wolf is
extremely valuable, but the wolf has already swallowed the grandmother,
who represents the female poetic tradition that had long been
suppressed. Grandmother has been reduced to bones, but Little Red
Cap takes them to herself and recognises that they are “glistening, virgin
white”.
Just as Carol Ann Duffy the woman came to recognise herself as
needing both men and women in her life, being openly bisexual, she
also developed a poetic voice that took the best of both male and female
traditions and welded them together. This is summarised very well in
“Little Red Cap”