The Road to Milk Wood

Abstract

Under Milk Wood is the poetic ‘play for voices’ that Thomas conceived and wrote for BBC radio over the closing years of his life. A complete but unfinished version of the play was first read publicly in May 1953, six months before the poet died, first by Thomas himself at Fogg Museum, Harvard University, and then by Thomas with a group of five American actors at the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association in New York, where, as we saw, John Malcolm Brinnin was Director.¹ Though never quite finished, the play nevertheless continues to enjoy a wide readership and even wider audience, especially on stage, where it has evoked some brilliant audio, musical, and stage effects, sometimes at the expense of the poet’s language. Set in a tiny seaside village in Wales, famously entitled Llareggub (‘bugger all’ backwards), the play chronicles one day in the lives of the village’s inhabitants at a time roughly contemporary with the play’s composition, though the accentuated provinciality of the village guarantees its anachronism. The physical and social setting, and some of the attitudes and activities of its large cast of eccentric characters, are described and evoked by one or two neutral narrators or ‘Voices’, depending on which edition you choose.² Otherwise, it is the voices of the villagers themselves who, in monologue or dialogue, record their own lives and opinions.

REV. ELI JENKINS

Every morning when I wake, Dear Lord, a little prayer I make, O please to keep Thy lovely eye On all poor creatures born to die.

— Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood