Point of View

“Little Red Cap” is written from the first-person point of view using the pronoun “I”. However, this first-person speaker doesn’t directly appear until the closing line of the first stanza: “It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf” (Line 6). This narrative choice allows the emotional setup of an omniscient perspective before focusing the poem’s attention on the central character. From this point forward the poem becomes much more personal and intimate, focusing on the speaker’s emotions and experiences. Notably, there is also a shift from the subjective (“What big eyes he had! What teeth!” [Line 10]) to the objective (“I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up” [Line 41]). This parallels the way the speaker has shifted from being an emotional teenager to a more level-headed, cognitively distant woman. While she had initially been driven by curiosity and...