Under Milk Wood

This was a totally immersive pleasure. I savoured every word - and they're in abundance as they come at you almost without pause for thought or breath in this extended prose poem - 'a play for voices'. The tempo and rhythm matches that of a day's span: gentle and deliberate at times, busily frenzied at others. I don't know if this is Thomas' masterpiece as I'm only at the beginning of reading his work, but it must surely have been hard to better. It is a small piece of perfection - short in length but leaving a lasting impression. A day in the life of the backwater seaside town of Llareggub. I should say that it is a fictional town, but that almost seems ungrateful on my part - such is the power and vivid impression of his rendering of show more that place. It is a place alive with spirit and flavour, sounds and smells, tones and tastes. There are ghosts and poetry, dreams and gossip. Hopes and memories abound. At times I was struck by an almost Chagall-like sense of imagery. There are equal parts tragedy and wonder, as well as the fantastic and the banal; and a fair dollop of fruity humour to boot.

I had the pleasure of listening to the audiobook version remade by the BBC in 2003, featuring the pitch-perfect original recording of Richard Burton as 'First Voice', together with a new all-Welsh cast of many wonderful voices - including Sian Phillips as 'Second Voice'. I've seen the 1970s film adaptation before but this audio recording was superlative. Now I want a printed edition - and I hope there'll be a suitably designed commemorative one out in 2014 for the Thomas centenary - as I know that I will want to savour this all again, line by line, over and over. As soon as I finished it I put the first disc back in and had to listen to it all over again. It is a magical and beautiful thing. show less

I'm in love.

I want to read and listen again. Probably multiple times, if possible. There's so many sudden flashes of humor and delight, and this being my first time through, I reveled in those moments when you feel uncertain, then a lightbulb goes on with that adrenaline rush of illumination.

And the language is to die for.

It reminded me a bit of two other classics, the 1914 [Spoon River Anthology] poems by Edgar Lee Masters (except Thomas' people are sleeping, Masters' people are sleeping forever) and also the 1922 poem [The Waste Land] by T S Eliot, especially in the "Goodnight, ladies" part. But this work came later--equally good and definitely Dylan made it his own.

I listened to the play on YT, the one with Richard Burton and show more followed along reading it. I noticed the play did not include all the text. Wonder if Dylan continued to work on the play even after that performance, or if some was cut due to time constraints. Never mind, the audio was dreamy good and added immensely to the pleasure of the play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im7ICMh0h9M&list=PLBx3BOGiHZrXqgEZ2xhUZWn4Ep...

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0608221.txt show less

"Under Milk Wood" is a radio play and while I am used to reading plays and have also read a handful of radio/audio plays, I realized after a couple of pages that this one must definitely be listened to. My husband was sitting next to me reading his fantasy novel and I disturbed him every few minutes because I wanted to read a passage to him. These words and sentences simply beg to be read aloud, and I tried doing this in my head as well as I could, but I still think that the experience is only a fraction of what listening to it might offer. Every word carries meaning, there are so many puns and word plays, and I think that I read it far too quickly (because that is my pace even if I try to read more slowly) to even appreciate half of show more it.
The story is set in Wales in the small town of Llareggub (read that in reverse!) and we follow the inhabitants through their day - from their dreams during the night when we learn about their secrets, their desires and fears, until the next evening. It is funny, sad, disturbing, sometimes incomprehensible to me (I think that will get better when I listen to it), crazy and still so true to life in many aspects. There are so many characters that it is hard to keep up with them and to tell them all apart, but that is another aspect that I think will be better when one listens to it. show less

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 show more also from the valleys) 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!) show less

A radio-play thats part beatnik poem. It describes a day in the life of a small village starting with their dreams as they sleep and following them until they sleep again.
The beatnik style can take a little getting used to, and i have a dislike of the surreal so the opening dream-sequences were a little jarring. Overall though its pretty funny and a bit moving in places.

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 show more 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. show less

A creative and lyrical play that takes place over the course of single day in a small coastal Welsh town, starting with the dreams of people in the town and then drifting around them somewhat randomly to paint a picture of their personalities and lives.

Thomas would die very shortly afterwards completing the work at the age of 39 following a bender in which he was quoted as saying "I've drunk eighteen straight whiskies -- I think that's the record." Pity.

Quotes:
Of love lost:
“Now men from every parish round
Run after me and roll me on the ground
But whenever I love another man back
Johnnie from the Hill or Sailing Jack
I always think as they do what they please
Of Tom Dick and Harry who were tall as trees
And most I think when I’m by their show more side
Of little Willy Wee who downed and died.”

On lust:
“Gossamer Beynon high-heels out of school. The sun hums down through the cotton flowers of her dress into the bell of her heart and buzzes in the honey there and crouches and kisses, lazy-loving and boozed, in her red-berried breast. Eyes run from the trees and windows of the street, steaming ‘Gossamer,’ and strip her to the nipples and the bees. She blazes naked past the Sailors Arms, the only woman on the Dai-Adamed earth. Sinbad Sailors places on her thighs still dewdamp from the first mangrowing cockcrow garden his reverent goat-bearded hands.”

And:
“I’ll tell you no lies.
The only sea I saw
Was the seesaw sea
With you riding on it.
Lie down, lie easy.
Let me shipwreck in your thighs.”

On poisoning someone, I love the descriptiveness:
“Alone in the hissing laboratory of his wishes, Mr. Pugh minces among bad vats and jeroboams, tiptoes through spinneys of murdering herbs, agony dancing in his crucibles, and mixes especially for Mrs. Pugh a venomous porridge unknown to toxicologists which will scald and viper through her until her ears fall off like figs, her toes grow big and black as balloons, and steam comes screaming out of her navel.”

And:
“Sly and silent, he foxes into his chemist’s den and there, in a hiss and prussic circle of cauldrons and phials brimming with pox and the Black Death, cooks up a fricassee of deadly nightshade, nicotine, hot frog, cyanide, and bat-spit for his needling stalactite hag and bednag of a pokerbacked nutcracker wife.” show less