Little Red Cap Summary

At the poem's opening, the speaker (a version of Little Red Riding Hood) has recently left childhood and has found herself in an unpleasant and disorienting adolescence, depicted through a desolate, industrial setting. The speaker discovers a wolf in a clearing. He is reading his own poetry and holding a book. He is enormous and has red wine stains on his beard. The teenage speaker seeks out his attention, especially taken with his connection to poetry. The wolf buys the speaker her first drink and then guides her back to his lair in the woods. On the journey, the speaker's clothes become tattered and she loses her shoes. However, she eventually finds herself in the lair. There, they have sex. Though the wolf calls this a "love poem," the speaker is more excited by the books on the wolf's shelf, which she reads after he falls asleep. She also seeks out a dove, which the wolf eats. For ten years, the speaker remains with the wolf. As she grows up, she learns to contextualize her situation. She compares the wolf to a mushroom growing in a corpse's mouth, suggesting that he has hushed her own voice. She also implies that his poetry is repetitive and uninteresting, and ultimately that he is not the sophisticated and intriguing poet she found him to be as a child. Realizing she wants to escape, the speaker cuts the wolf open with an axe. Inside him she finds her own grandmother's digested bones. She fills the wolf's stomach with stones before leaving the woods. She then emerges, holding flowers and singing.