The title sets up a small paradox. Kings abdicate; princesses wait their turn. A princess who abdicates is giving up something she has not yet been handed, which suggests the poem is about refusing an inheritance before it arrives. The refusal turns out to be larger than a crown. What the speaker rejects is the whole idea of power as mastery, and what she chooses in its place is the poem's last line.
The opening couplet is built to be read two ways: "how the king is made / a child cannot believe." Perhaps a child is too innocent to accept that kingship is something manufactured, stitched together out of ceremony and costume. Or perhaps the child simply sees through it and cannot believe anyone takes it seriously. In both readings the verb "made" does the damage, because a king who is made is not a king by nature. The next stanza then breaks off in a way that feels deliberate. "It is impossible / that ambition" leaves "ambition" stranded at the end of a line, and the sentence only resumes in the next couplet: "to master all things / but have nothing to do." The thought is oddly sad. Total mastery leaves nothing to strive for, so the person who masters everything ends up idle.
The most playful move is the pivot in "in matters of the state / of play." The line break turns a solemn political phrase into an everyday idiom, the "state of play" that describes how a game currently stands. Government, in a single enjambment, becomes a game. The short second line, only two words, lands almost like a shrug, and it matches the child's-eye view from the first stanza. Seen from far enough away, kingdoms look like play.
Then the poem changes ground, quite literally: "the sand we stand on / finds infinite fault with it." Here the sound is the point. "Sand" and "stand" are as close to a rhyme as this unrhymed poem gets, and the echo makes the unstable footing feel almost physical. "Fault" works twice, as blame and as a fault line, so the ground is both criticising something and cracking under it. The pronoun "it" has no clear antecedent. It could be the state, the ambition, or the whole game, and the reader has to decide. The word "we" is also new. Until now the poem has spoken of a king and a child at a distance, and here the speaker stands on the same shifting ground as everyone else.
Everything has been leading to the single closing line, which stands alone after five couplets: "and I resolve to be the world." It is the only line with "I," and its opening "and" makes it sound like the conclusion of an argument. "Resolve" is a word for firm decisions, but it also carries an older sense of dissolving something into its parts, which fits a poem about giving up a fixed position. The contrast with "master all things" is what makes the line work. To master the world is to stand over it; to be the world is to stop standing apart. The princess does not lose her kingdom so much as swap a throne for a far larger and less stable territory. The line is also faintly ambiguous. A reader could hear humility in it, or could hear a grander ambition in disguise.
The form supports this sense of loosening. There is no rhyme and no fixed meter, and the lines run from two syllables to eight. The vocabulary is plain and mostly short, which suits a poem partly seen through a child's eyes. The couplets give a measured, almost ceremonial rhythm that the syntax keeps interrupting, so the form stays upright while the sentences fall apart. The last line, at eight syllables, runs with a steadier, nearly iambic beat, and it feels like the first moment of firm footing after all that sand.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so few words. It shows authority as something constructed, and it shows how language holds that construction up, since an idiom is enough to turn "the state" into "play." Then it leaves the reader to decide whether the ending is renunciation or a different kind of claim.