"Little Red Cap" is a poem by Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy, originally published in her 1999 collection The World's Wife. The poem describes a young girl's romance with a menacing wolf, who seduces her by appealing to her love of poetry. Based on the "Little Red Riding Hood" tale, Duffy borrows from the imagery and language of fairytale in order to explore relevant contemporary questions of gender and artistry. The poem is partly based on Duffy's own decade-long relationship with the poet Adrian Henri. However, Duffy has described her relationship with Henri as a close and positive one, in contrast to the poem's portrayal of the wolf. The poem is as much a work of fiction and literary retelling as it is one of autobiography.
The work consists of seven six-line stanzas, or sextets. Over the course of the poem, a speaker describes her adolescent self meeting a wolf. The wolf takes her to his lair, where they develop a sexual relationship, and where the speaker uses the wolf's books to hone her literary interests. After ten years, the speaker realizes that the wolf is suppressing rather than aiding her independence and artistic development. She kills him and escapes, discovering that he has already eaten her grandmother. Written in free verse, the poem nevertheless makes heavy use of sound elements including assonance, slant rhyme, and internal rhyme. In this way, Duffy balances an informal tone with a highly emotive, expressive work. Its tone, meanwhile, is somber and thoughtful, full of the drama that fills its fairytale source material.
