The title does half the work before the first line arrives. "Citizen, lunatic" sets two labels side by side, and the comma lets them be read two ways: as two separate roles, or as the second word sneering at the first. The word "lunatic" comes from the Latin for moon, and the poem quietly collects its images from that root. Someone who stays alert to official falsehood, the title hints, may be called mad for it.
The poem is a single sentence stretched across four couplets, with no punctuation at all. It opens with a weary fragment, "tired of the war lies / growing every day," and the lowercase start makes it feel like a thought already underway. "War lies" is deliberately open. It could mean lies told about a war, or lies that belong to war the way weapons do. The verb "growing" matters too. Lies that grow every day behave like a tide coming in or a moon waxing, and the poem soon moves into exactly that territory.
The speaker's reaction is physical rather than argumentative: "I am given to unquiet / like the sea." The phrase "given to" suggests temperament, a habit of mind, but it also means handed over, not chosen. The speaker doesn't decide to be restless; the state is delivered to him. "Unquiet" is a better word than "restless" because it is defined by what is missing. Quiet is the thing denied him. The simile also depends on something the poem never says. The sea is unquiet because the moon pulls it. By naming the sea in one couplet and the moon in the next, the poem links the speaker's agitation to the moon that gives "lunatic" its meaning, and the reader assembles that link without being told.
The moon arrives as an object of strange wonder: "the deadened / glory of a moon." The line break leaves "deadened" hanging at the end of its line, so it lands heavily. The word is chosen with care. "Dead" would describe a state, but "deadened" suggests something done to the moon, a dulling. "Glory" is also a loaded word in a poem about war, since it belongs to the vocabulary of medals and monuments, and the moon's glory is only borrowed light anyway. Judging by the imagery, the speaker looks up at a beautiful, hollowed-out thing and sees in it an image of what the war lies have done to every grand word. "Wonder at" holds both senses of the phrase: to marvel and to question.
The last couplet turns on a firm, slightly old-fashioned "shall": "which I shall not think safe / out of my sight." The phrase inverts "out of sight, out of mind." Out of sight is not safe for this speaker, so he will not let the moon, or anything else, drift out of his attention. The poem never explains why the moon might be unsafe, and that vagueness is its sharpest point. A mind fed on lies learns to distrust everything it cannot see, and that is both what a good citizen does and what a lunatic does. The poem ends without telling us which one the speaker is.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, so the sentence has no resting places, much like the speaker. Each couplet breaks mid-phrase ("unquiet / like the sea"), and the second lines are mostly shorter than the first, so they trail off like water pulling back down a beach. The sounds link the imagery: the long *i* of "lies," "like," "my" and "sight," and the soft *s* and *g* sounds of "sea," "safe," "sight," "growing," "given" and "glory," which murmur through the poem like a tide.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It names no country, leader or conflict, and it never shouts. It places political exhaustion inside the body and the night sky, and it uses the old association of moon and madness to ask a serious question: when the public story can't be trusted, is staying watchful a duty or a symptom?