Of everything that looks up at the night sky in this poem, only one claims to love the moon, and it gets there by first saying what love is not. Mainak Biswas's "Moonstruck" is a short address to the moon, but the moon is never named in the lines. The title and the single word "moonlight" do that work, and otherwise the moon is simply "You". The central idea is that real love is not worship, indifference or possession. It is something quieter and more personal, a steady attention that returns every night.
The first half sets a tender scene. "I see you every night" makes the speaker's devotion a habit rather than a sudden feeling. The sky is "Black", capitalised as if it were a proper name, and against it hang "the bright bright stars". The doubled "bright" sounds spoken rather than written, a childlike intensifier that makes the stars almost audible. The most interesting line follows: "I see your smile to them, to me." The speaker puts "me" right after "them", so the moon's smile reaches the stars and the speaker alike, and the speaker becomes one more small point in the crowd. The next line widens the circle again, since moonlight is "coming to all". The moon is generous and unselective, which raises a problem the rest of the poem tries to answer. If the moon gives itself to everyone, what can one person offer back that is different?
The answer comes through three portraits. The Night bird "prays", the Lion is "careless", and the Cloud "covers". Each is a different way of relating to something bright and distant. The bird looks up in worship, the lion cannot be bothered to look, and the cloud slides in between and hides what it cannot own. Judging by the choices, the poem sweeps through the whole world, from sky to ground and back to sky, before making its claim. The grammar works like a ritual refusal: "I am not... Who... / I am not... Who... / I am not... Who...". By the third repetition the reader expects a fourth, and when it arrives the pattern both completes and breaks. "But, I am the One, / Who loves You." The comma after "But" works as a small hesitation, a breath taken before a confession.
The poem has no regular metre and no conventional rhyme scheme. It is free verse in short, plain lines, and the sound of speech does the shaping. Even so, one word works like a rhyme. Four lines end on "You": "prays to You", "careless to You", "covers You", "loves You". The word becomes a drumbeat, and the effect is quietly clever. The moon stays the same throughout, and the only thing that changes is the verb. Prayer, carelessness, concealment and love are set side by side, each pointed at the same "You", so the difference between them is made to feel as small and as large as a single word. The last line is also the shortest, only two strong beats, so the poem stops on its heaviest weight.
The capital letters add to this. "Night", "Black", "You" and "One" all get them, and the effect is to lift the moon and the dark toward something like divinity. But the speaker is also "the One", which raises the lover to a kind of equal rank. The claim could sound boastful, yet the poem softens it. The speaker never says they are better than the bird, the lion or the cloud, only that they are different. Nor do they demand anything in return, since the moon has already smiled "to me" without being asked.
Poets have addressed the moon for a very long time, so the subject is hardly new. What gives this poem its charm is its modesty and its logic. "Moonstruck" is a word for being dazed and slightly foolish with feeling, and the poem shows that state without ornament. It uses plain words, a repeated pattern and one carefully placed "But". For a young reader it is also a useful lesson in how a poem can say a great deal by saying what something is not.