Summary
Upon arriving at the wolf's lair, the wolf and the speaker are implied to have sex, which is referred to as a "love poem." The speaker clings to the wolf's fur overnight, then escapes his grasp to seek out a white, living dove. The dove flies from the speaker's hands to the wolf's mouth and he eats it, calling it "breakfast in bed." When the wolf falls asleep again, the speaker goes to his bookshelves and escapes into the vibrant world of literature. However, it takes her a decade of living out in the woods with the wolf to gain an adult perspective—such as the fact that mushrooms can grow from corpses' mouths, that birds are expressions of trees' consciousness, and that aging wolves always howl the same song as time passes. Becoming curious, the speaker uses an axe to attack a willow tree and a salmon in order to see their reactions. She then uses the axe to cut the wolf, from his scrotum up to his throat, and sees the bones of her own grandmother in his stomach. She fills him with stones and then emerges out of the woods, singing a song by herself.
Analysis
For the young speaker, the wolf is both a way to enter the world of literature and a force keeping her from fully discovering it. The speaker cites "poetry" as the reason for her initial interest in the wolf, and indeed for the speaker, whose life until now has been devoid of poetry, the wolf is the most immediate access point to it: he writes poems and owns books, although his literary interests seem to be as much a form of self-aggrandizement as they are genuine passions. The "love poem" of sex with the wolf is depicted somewhat prosaically, as if the speaker is not entirely absorbed by it. However, her experience of reading the wolf's books is described in almost sexual terms, or at least in highly vivid and vital ones. Indeed, one of the ways in which Duffy keeps the poem somewhat playful, despite the wolf's predatory threatening actions, is by depicting the speaker as almost taking advantage of him. Even when somewhat in thrall to the wolf, she is less interested in him than she is in his books, making his power over her (at least on an emotional level) limited.
What frees the speaker from the wolf, after an entire decade together, is simply the realization that he's not a very good source of literary companionship. In fact, the speaker suggests, he is impeding her love of poetry rather than aiding it. She mentions the image of a mushroom growing from and clogging the mouth of a corpse, suggesting that the wolf has rendered her almost lifeless and has stoppered her self-expression. Meanwhile, she also describes a wolf howling the same song at the moon for years on end, which implies that the wolf is not so much a creative poet as he is a boring purveyor of gimmicks. Once she realizes that the wolf can't offer her the creative fulfillment she seeks, the speaker finds it easy to kill him and leave, cutting him open just as the protagonist of the "Little Red Riding Hood" story does.
Also like Little Red Riding Hood, the speaker finds her grandmother inside the wolf—in this case not alive but as a collection of bones. This suggests that the grandmother was victimized much like the speaker herself. Her bones are even described as "virgin," implying both her youth and the wolf's sexual predation. The grandmother, it seems was less lucky than the speaker and was unable to escape the wolf. By mentioning the grandmother, Duffy brings in a broader theme of the suppression of women's creativity throughout history. Duffy suggests that we have been deprived of much literary and other creative output by women as a result of sexism and inequality. Thus, the speaker is not merely escaping her own personal trap, but ending an intergenerational curse.
