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A review by batbones
Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas
5.0
Words are overlapping echoes, a babbling hush of voices like the lapping of the sea against rocks and sand. In them, the characters live their coloured dreams and muted torments. Appropriately subtitled 'a play for voices', Under Milk Wood is best rendered when read aloud, giving full expression to its poetic music. One thing I admire most of Dylan Thomas is his dexterity in handling language; his instincts for rhyme, colour are equal to the mastery of Burgess and Joyce. Thomasian language is feeling and playfulness, and bitter poignancy; it conveys every trembling thread of sentiment, right down to the void of nothing. In this poem-play, Thomas renders with all sensitivity and honesty lives in as many ways as life can be lived - splendidly, dully, in secret, openly, sensitively, blithely. His diction is dreamlike and diamond-sharp - a single, acute sentence opens up yet another dark, glimmering facet of an otherwise small-town nobody: a reverend who delights in poetry and dips his pen in cocoa composing verse, and a retired, hardened sea captain who mourns his deceased love, the headmistress and the sailor who maintain an erotic mutual attraction that is never spoken of. Placidity is gossamer thin, punctured/punctuated by thoughts of sex and murder. It is an acute picture of life in its shades of pleasure and unannounced pain.
"SECOND VOICE: 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 couches 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 ... Sinbad Sailor places on her thighs still dewdamp from the first mangrowing cock-crow garden his reverent goat-bearded hands."
"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 your vases.
I've put cheese in the mouseholes.
Here's your...
... nice tea, dear.
MRS PUGH:
Too much sugar.
MR PUGH:
You haven't tasted it yet, dear."
"SECOND VOICE: 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 couches 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 ... Sinbad Sailor places on her thighs still dewdamp from the first mangrowing cock-crow garden his reverent goat-bearded hands."
"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 your vases.
I've put cheese in the mouseholes.
Here's your...
... nice tea, dear.
MRS PUGH:
Too much sugar.
MR PUGH:
You haven't tasted it yet, dear."