[*Under Milk Wood* is billed as "a play for voices" and was in its earlier stages entitled *Llareggub, a Piece for Radio Perhaps*. The first section was performed at the YMHA in New York City in 1953, with Thomas himself reading the parts of First Voice and the Reverend Eli Jenkins. My senior year of high school, we performed the same section (directed by Clelia Peters, wherever she is now) as a performance piece. I was First Voice. The voices sat on stools in the four corners of the stage and the others did expressive dance stuff. It was my theatrical debut, and it was fabulous. My point being that this is exceedingly versatile. Right. Enjoy.]
[Silence]
FIRST VOICE [very softly]
To begin at the beginning:
It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and- rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.
Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrogered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wet-nosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.
You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing.
Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep.
And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the darkest-before- dawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride.
Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row, it is the grass growing on Llareggub Hill, dewfall, starfall, the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.
Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats, suckling mintoes, fortywinking hallelujah; night in the four-ale, quiet as a domino; in Ocky Milkman's lofts like a mouse with gloves; in Dai Bread's bakery flying like black flour. It is to-night in Donkey Street, trotting silent, with seaweed on its hooves, along the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot, text and trinket, harmonium, holy dresser, watercolours done by hand, china dog and rosy tin teacaddy. It is night neddying among the snuggeries of babies.
Look. It is night, dumbly, royally winding though the Coronation cherry trees; going through the graveyard of Bethesda with winds gloved and folded, and dew doffed; tumbling by the Sailors Arms.
Time passes. Listen. Time passes.
Come closer now.
Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night. Only you can see in the blinded bedrooms, the combs and petticoats over the chairs, the jugs and basins, the glasses of teeth, Thou Shalt Not on the wall, and the yellowing, dickybird-watching pictures of the dead. Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams.
From where you are, you can hear their dreams.
Captain Cat, the retired, blind seacaptain, asleep in his bunk in the seashelled, ship-in-bottled, shipshape best cabin of Schooner House dreams of
SECOND VOICE
never such seas as any that swamped the decks of his S.S. Kidwelly bellying over the bedclothes and jellyfish slippery sucking him down salt deep into the Davy dark where the fish come biting out and nibble him down to his wishbone, and the long drowned nuzzle up to him.
FIRST DROWNED
Remember me, Captain?
CAPTAIN CAT
You're Dancing Williams!
FIRST DROWNED
I lost my step in Nantucket.
SECOND DROWNED
Do you see me, Captain? the white bone talking? I'm Tom-Fred the donkeyman . . . we shared the same girl once . . . her name was Mrs. Probert . . .
WOMAN'S VOICE
Rosie Probert, thirty-three Duck Lane. Come on up, boys, I'm dead.
THIRD DROWNED
Hold me, Captain, I'm Jonah Jarvis, come to a bad end, very enjoyable.
FOURTH DROWNED
Alfred Pomeroy Jones, sealawyer, born in Mumbles, sung like a linnet, crowned you with a flagon, tattoed with mermaids, thirst like a dredger, died of blisters.
FIRST DROWNED
This skull at your earhole is
FIFTH DROWNED
Curly Bevan. Tell my auntie it was me that pawned the ormulu clock.
CAPTAIN CAT
Aye, aye, Curly.
SECOND DROWNED
Tell my missus no I never
THIRD DROWNED
I never done what she said I never
FOURTH DROWNED
Yes, they did.
FIFTH DROWNED
And who brings coconuts and shawls and parrots to *my* Gwen now?
FIRST DROWNED
How's it above?
SECOND DROWNED
Is there rum and lavabread?
THIRD DROWNED
Bosoms and robins?
FOURTH DROWNED
Concertinas?
FIFTH DROWNED
Ebenezer's bell?
FIRST DROWNED
Fighting and onions?
SECOND DROWNED
And sparrows and daisies?
THIRD DROWNED
Tiddlers in a jamjar?
FOURTH DROWNED
Buttermilk and whippets?
FIFTH DROWNED
Rock-a-bye baby?
FIRST DROWNED
Washing on the line?
SECOND DROWNED
And old girls in the snug?
THIRD DROWNED
How's the tenors in Dowlais?
FOURTH DROWNED
Who milks the cows in Maesgwyn?
FIFTH DROWNED
When she smiles, is there dimples?
FIRST DROWNED
What's the smell of parsley?
CAPTAIN CAT
Oh, my dead dears!
FIRST VOICE
From where you are, you can hear in Cockle Row in the spring, moonless night, Miss Price, dressmaker and sweetshop-keeper, dream of
SECOND VOICE
her lover, tall as the town clock tower, Samson-syrup-gold-maned, whacking thighed and piping hot, thunderbolt bass'd and barnacle-breasted, flailing up the cockles with his eyes like blowlamps and scooping low over her lonely loving hotwaterbottled body.
MR EDWARDS
Myfanwy Price!
MISS PRICE
Mr Mog Edwards!
MR EDWARDS
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.
MISS PRICE
I will knit you a wallet of forget-me-not blue, for the money to be comfy. I will warm your heart by the fire so that you can slip it in under your vest when the shop is closed.
MR EDWARDS
Myfanwy, Myfanwy, before the mice gnaw at your bottom drawer will you say
MISS PRICE
Yes, Mog, yes, Mog, yes, yes, yes.
MR EDWARDS
And all the bells of the tills of the town shall ring for our wedding. [noise of money-tills and chapel bells]
From Thomas, Dylan. *Under Milk Wood*. New York: New Directions, 1954.
Disclaimer: I have no permission from anyone to put this up on the Web. It is very possibly a complete violation of extant copyright law.
However, I do have a life (although it may not be obvious to the casual onlooker), and typing all this up is a complete and utter labor of
my unabashed hero worship for the person quoted above. So don't sue, please.