Under Milk Wood

A radio 'feature', rather than a play, according to the introduction to my edition, Under Milk Wood is amazing. It's full of lively, unique description, a rapidfire sketch of village life. I can't even pick out a part I like best because all of it is vivacious and interesting. The description, on the first page, for just one example, of the night, 'starless and bible-black'. Dylan Thomas knew what he was doing when it came to language, at all times, and it shows.

The introduction to this edition, by Walford Davies, is a very good one, giving an idea of the background of the story, context to explain what's going on, bits about Dylan's writing process... And the back is full of explanatory notes.

A quick read. Likely to reward rereading richly, I'd say. ( )

Dylan Thomas originally intended this work to be radio play. However, my first experience of it was seeing the film adaptation narrated by Richard Burton, back when I was in high school in the 1970s. I remember two things about the experience: loving the sound of Richard Burton's voice, and feeling overwhelmed. This extract from the review in the New York Times goes some way to explaining my reaction:
Too many words, perhaps, for the stage. Too many words, I'm convinced, for the screen. It's not simply the quantity of words, though. It's also their ornateness. They overflow the ears and get into the eyes. Great clouds of them everywhere, like swarms of big soft gnats. They won't stop, and they make the job of the film adapter almost impossible.
Since then I've read the play and seen at least one stage production. However, it took until today, when I saw this production by the Sydney Theatre Company that I came to fully appreciate not just the magic of Thomas' words, but the fact that a stage production really can work. The production was wonderful and the words are still racing around inside my head.

A few years ago, my daughter recited these lines from the play at the wedding of her best friend to a Welsh boy. This is what Mr Edwards says to Miss Price:
I am a draper mad with love. I love you more than all the flannelette and calico, candlewick, dimity, crash and merino, tussore, cretonne, crepon, muslin, poplin, ticking and twill in the whole Cloth Hall of the world. I have come to take you away to my Emporium on the hill, where the change hums on wires. Throw away your little bedsocks and your Welsh wool knitted jacket, I will warm the sheets like an electric toaster, I will lie by your side like the Sunday roast.
Wonderful, wonderful writing. The great clouds of words no longer overwhelm me. They transport me.
( )

Rewritten July 30th, 2011, read way back when and reread 2011

Some works of literature just beg to be read out loud - This is the House that Jack Built and Hiawatha are two that most people are familiar with. Under Milkwood too, is better appreciated read aloud.

A sample (read aloud with Welsh accent, sing-song, go up like a question at the end of the line):

FIRST VOICE

Mr Pugh, in the School House opposite, takes up the morning
tea to Mrs Pugh, and whispers on the stairs

MR. PUGH

Here's your arsenic, dear.
And your weedkiller biscuit.
I've throttled your parakeet.
I've spat in the vases.
I've put cheese in the mouseholes.
Here's your... [_Door creaks open_
...nice tea, dear.

MRS PUGH

Too much sugar.

Or try this, read by Richard Burton (who was also from the valleys)

When">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuPO2Kvqlms


When I read this play by Dylan Thomas, I hear the village life of my childhood come to life. He caught the lilt and cadence of the valley speech and the trivial preoccupations of the people perfectly. Of course it helps that like Dylan Thomas I am also from South Wales and have the accent down pat!

A little known fact, apparent to all Welsh people but no-one else, is that the village of Llareggub which looks perfectly Welsh is actually the English Bugger All backwards. (If it had been Welsh it would have been Llanreggub and mean the Parish of St. Reggub!) ( )

If I could go back in time about 45 minutes ago and beat myself into a bloody, vegetative state, or at least into an illiterate delirium, so that I wouldn't have read this book, I would. If I could fit pliers into my ears so that I could rip out the sound of this play from my head forever, I would. If I could dig up Dylan Thomas' body and rig it with explosives and blow it up, making me blind from the concussion and so ensuring that I never accidentally read so much as a line of this again, because I know I'm too lazy to learn Braille, I would. ( )

A smorgasbord of language. I am still blown away every time I read that first measured sentence, about the woodland ‘limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea’.

If you only knew Dylan Thomas from his short poems (as I did before I read this) then prepare for a very pleasant shock. The wonderful rhythm of the lines here, the extraordinary creativity of compound words and unexpected similes, all sustained over a considerable distance, is something quite distinctive and entirely absorbing. And surprisingly funny at times: there is a lot of warm, affectionate interplay between the different characters of this sleepy Welsh town, rivalries, fantasies, frustrations, sexual liaisons real and imagined, boredom, dreams – everything you'd expect from small-town life is here.

But it's the poetic language that makes me really love it. The ‘sunhoneyed cobbles’, the ‘dumb goose-hiss of the wives’, Gossamer Benyon who is ‘spoonstirred and quivering’ and who ‘high-heels out of school’ – milk churns that stand ‘like short, silver policemen’, and lovers in ‘the grassgreen gooseberried double bed of the wood’ – it's all described as though in the throes of some ecstatic vision, which I suppose is what good poetry should be like.

I don't want to overstate my case too much, but go here and listen to Richard Burton reading the opening section, and if you're not rolling on the floor in delight after about thirty seconds, then you probably have no soul. ( )