Five short lines, and someone is already cross. "O rat" could be a curse, an accusation, or half of a muttered "drat," and the poem never says which rat is meant or who is speaking. What follows is a scene small enough to fit on a kitchen table: a plate with nothing on it. Then, after a gap, the scale lurches upward: "the little prince this day / proclaimed a war." The whole poem lies between those two moments. Hunger and grievance, once offended, can swell into something that demands a banner and a trumpet.
The empty plate invites two readings, and the poem lets both stand. In the domestic one, the "O rat" blames some creature for the missing food, and the household's "little prince" (the sort of name given to a beloved or spoiled child) answers with a tantrum dressed up as statecraft. In the political one, the plate stands for scarcity at a common table, and a ruler responds by declaring war rather than feeding anyone. The title supports the second reading. A diversion can be an amusement, but it is also a military feint, a move that draws attention away from the real trouble. The poem does the same to us. We are looking at the plate, and the second stanza pulls our eyes elsewhere.
The most carefully built line is "full of air alone." After "empty," the word "full" is a small collision. Because there is no punctuation, the line before it runs on and the two words almost touch: "the plate sat empty / full of air." "Full of air" is also an old idiom for talk with nothing behind it, so the plate quietly predicts the proclamation to come. Where food should be there is only wind, and wind is what a declaration of war is made of. "Alone" works two ways. It can mean the plate holds only air, or that the plate is solitary and abandoned, like the person who should be eating from it.
The sound is more patterned than the plain surface suggests. "Rat" and "sat" give the opening its only true chime, so that the plate's stillness echoes the speaker's exclamation. A long *a* sound then threads through "plate," "day" and "proclaimed," with "air" close behind. There is no end-rhyme in the usual sense, and the poem doesn't need one. It ends on "war," which closes on the same *r* as "air" without rhyming, a faint consonant link between the empty thing and the terrible one.
The rhythm is short-breathed. Counting syllables gives roughly two, five and five in the first stanza, then six and four in the second, so the poem has a haiku-like compression without keeping to the form. The first three lines are clipped and almost gasped. "The little prince this day" has the lilt of a nursery rhyme, with its bouncing little-prince beat, and then "proclaimed a war" lands heavily. The vocabulary shifts as well. "This day" and "proclaimed" are borrowed from royal announcements, and putting them on a "little" figure is mock-heroic, a child in a king's robe. "Little" works in several ways at once. It sounds affectionate, condescending and diminishing, and the poem leaves it to the reader to decide which matters most. The indefinite article in "a war" is the coldest detail. It isn't *the* war, with its causes and history, but simply *a* war, picked up casually, as though any would do.
The poem is worth reading because it trusts the gap between its stanzas to carry its argument. It never states that rulers manufacture conflict to cover failures, or that great quarrels can start in childish appetite, but it sets a plate beside a proclamation and lets the reader connect them. It is also funny, and the humor is what makes it unsettling. The first stanza is comic, even a little silly, and the second takes that silliness and gives it an army. In barely twenty syllables, "Diversion" suggests how thin the line can be between a nursery grievance and a state decision. It also keeps its own question open: whether the war is the result of the empty plate, or only the way someone chose to avoid looking at it.