Capitoline Wolf

The Wolf is my favorite poem I've read out of the collection, thus far. I think it creates a manageable balance between the aggressive density of her style and ease or reading. Most of her poems require a couple of reads to parse out what happening, but this poem was mostly easy while still remaining dense. That said I generally find the numerous asides to be more distracting than constructive, but that's only my opinion.

The poem itself follows the speakers experience coming upon an injured dog and then is reminded of the "Capitoline Wolf" statue. She imagines herself within the place of the myth of the wolf and accepts the wolf who she notes is clearly out of place in the city environment. It is implied that her acceptance of the imagined Capitoline wolf is her also caring for the original framing wolf. Finally she muses that the wolf will only be remembered in her prime.

This poem can be read in a number of way, but the interpretations all hinge upon the wolf as some displaced being (e.g. a part of nature, a feminine body, a darkness intruding upon light) and accepting it regardless of it's otherness. The end of the poem is where things become a bit more fuzzy. The literal interpretation of the speaker making "her something better than she could herself" makes sense, but it complicates who the speaker is meant to represent in the metaphor. Further I'm not entirely sure how to read the question of memory at the end of the poem. What is the "prime" of "a thing of great disorder?" I understood it as a paving over of the histories of the displaced groups, but that would suggest we even give nature and chaos a place in our histories, which empirically just isn't the case.