Consider the following:

use strict;
use warnings;

local $_ = q{<>^};

for my $i (qw(<> >^)) {
    /\Q$i/p and print "${^MATCH}\n";
}
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Output:

<>
>^
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Remember that "^" can also be used to negate a class match in addition to denoting a match at the beginning of a line, e.g., /^[^aeiou]/i (no vowels at the beginning of a line). Both "<" and ">" are metacharacters. See this Extended regex sequences section.

Hope this helps!