Four short lines and a two-part title are enough to stage a whole war between one person and everybody else. Yet the odd thing is how little fighting the poem itself shows.
The war is declared in the subtitle. «Poetry girl against deaf world» sits in guillemets, the quotation marks used in French and many other European languages, so it reads like a tagline or a headline pinned over the poem. It is telegraphic: no articles, and "Poetry girl" is a compound that turns her into a label, almost a comic-book hero. The word "against" announces a battle. The great reversal is in the adjective, though. We expect the poet to be the unheard one, but here the world is deaf, and the failure of hearing belongs to everyone else. The title "Broken Princess" pulls the other way. It borrows from fairy tale, but the grammar is wrong for one. Princesses in stories get rescued, and this one arrives already broken, before any story has begun.
The poem proper is much quieter than its frame. "She was poetry" is a metaphor, not a simile. She isn't like poetry, she is it. The past tense is worth pausing on. Judging by the text, it suggests someone remembered, or someone changed, and it chimes with the "broken" of the title, though the poem never says what happened. The line runs to five syllables, then "in a world" shrinks to three. The world gets a small, boxed-in line, as if the girl has been given room to be something and then immediately placed inside a container.
The real action is in the last two lines: "which was still learning the / Alphabet". Here the line break does the work. It falls on "the", an article that promises a noun and doesn't deliver one, so the reader stumbles in the same place a learner would. Then comes "Alphabet", alone and capitalised. It is the only capital in the poem that isn't forced on us by the start of a line, so it looks like a word written carefully in a child's copybook, or perhaps given a mock grandeur. The poem has no punctuation at all, not even a full stop. The sentence simply trails off, unfinished, which suits a world that is "still learning".
The irony is neat. The alphabet is what poetry is made from. The world, then, has the raw material in its hands, the letters, but cannot read what they become when someone arranges them. The insult is gentle, almost patient. The world isn't cruel, only behind, and the word "still" carries a faint condescension, like a teacher sighing over a slow class. The poem also repeats its verb: she *was* poetry, the world *was* learning. The same small word describes both, and they never meet. There is even a quiet sound-link between "world" and "learning", which share the same vowel, as though learning were the world's whole identity.
Because there is no rhyme and no regular metre, this is free verse, and the rhythm does its own quiet work. The lines run roughly five, three, six and three syllables. The third line swells forward, then drops onto a three-syllable word. It is a sentence that builds up and deflates, which is exactly the feeling of expecting understanding and getting a spelling lesson. Reading it as a poem that refuses rhyme because it won't give the world the chime it expects is an interpretation, but the text invites it.
What makes the poem worth discussing is its compression. It takes an old idea, the misunderstood artist, and finds an image with its own logic. It also resists the self-pity that idea often attracts, partly through understatement: it never says she suffered, only that the world was slow. Notably, the final word is not "poetry" but "Alphabet", so the last thing we are left with is the world's limit, not the girl's gift. That leaves a question for the reader. Is she broken by the world's deafness, or only by the waiting? And which of us, reading, is still working through our letters?