There were many different poems that were on the document for me to read, however in class, we discussed one particular one.
Little Red-Cap
At childhood’s end, the houses petered out
into playing fields, the factory allotments
kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men,
the silent railway line, the hermit’s caravan,
till you came at last to the edge of the woods,
It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf.
He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud
in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw,
red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears
he had! What big eyes he had! What teeth!
in the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me,
sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink,
my first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry.
The Wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods,
away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place
lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake,
my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer
snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes
but got there, wolf’s lair, better beware. Lesson one that night,
breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem.
I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for
what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf?
Then I slid from between his heavy matted paws
and went in search of a living bird – white dove –
which flew, straight from my hands to his open mouth.
One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said,
licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back
of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books.
Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head,
warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.
But then I was young – and it took ten years
in the woods to tell that a mushroom
stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds
are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf
howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out,
season after season, sane rhyme, same reason. 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, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw
the glistening, virgin white of my grandmothers bones.
I filled his belly with stones. I stitched him up.
Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone.
I really enjoyed this poem personally, I though that it was a really impressive and amazing way to change some aspects of a typical and worldwide well known story of a young girl who is bringing her grandmother some supplies and ends up getting haunted and stalked by a wolf while she takes a shortcut into the dark woods.
In this version of the story written into a poem, instead of the innocent ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, it is almost as if the poem is talking about a young sixteen year old girl who is taken advantage of by some kind of wolf like man. However, the poem is also given a slightly dark twist when the reader realises that the little girl is almost also chasing after the wolf, it is almost as if she is the hunter and the wolf is the hunted in this poem. The ending of the poem is also quite dark, ending in the little girl (Or perhaps Carol Ann Duffy herself) killing and slicing up the wolf.
