Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View
First-person narration from the perspective of the titular character, now an adult woman recalling her teen years.
Form and Meter
The poem is written in seven sextets of free verse. While it has no consistent rhyme or meter it employs extensive end rhyme and slant rhyme.
Metaphors and Similes
Duffy uses a simile to compare the buildings and allotments around the speaker to mistresses, and uses a metaphor to compare the speaker's ripped clothes to murder clues.
Alliteration and Assonance
Alliteration appears in the phrases “the houses petered out / Into playing fields," "to a willow to see how it wept," and "breakfast in bed," with P, W, and B sounds respectively. Assonance appears in phrases like "out loud," and "murder clues. I lost both shoes," (the latter also being an instance of internal rhyme).
Irony
Duffy's choice to use a story associated with childhood—albeit one with many dark themes—to tell a dark and gritty tale creates an ironic, unexpected disconnect. Moreover, the speaker's intelligence being compared to the wolf's, despite his greater age, is a source of irony.
Genre
Lyric poetry, coming-of-age poem
Setting
The poem is set in a fairytale woodland as well as in a modern city, with the former serving as an extended metaphor for the latter.
Tone
Pensive, ironic, mournful, dramatic
Protagonist and Antagonist
The protagonist of the poem is Little Red Cap while the antagonist is the wolf.
Major Conflict
The poem's major conflict is between the speaker's desire for independence and fulfillment and the barriers to her reaching that fulfillment, embodied by the wolf.
Climax
The climax occurs when the speaker realizes that she has outgrown the wolf and has more knowledge and power than he does.
Foreshadowing
The poem's early reference to "murder clues" foreshadows the pain that the speaker will withstand.
Understatement
N/A
Allusions
The poem as a whole alludes to the "Little Red Cap" or "Little Red Riding Hood" fairytale.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
The word “paperback” is a conventionalized metonymy referring to a book, while "clapped eyes" is a phrase using synecdoche to describe the speaker seeing the wolf.
Personification
The speaker personifies poetry and literature by asserting they were “alive on the tongue, in the head.”
Hyperbole
The sentence "What little girl doesn't dearly love a wolf?" uses hyperbole.
Onomatopoeia
The term “drawl” is onomatopoetic.
