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EVERY lesson has a reflection in the last 5 minutes. WHAT - SO WHAT - NOW WHAT?
"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, fishingboatbobbing sea."
"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, fishingboatbobbing sea."
Under Milk Wood is a 1954 radio drama by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, commissioned by the BBC and later adapted for the stage. A film version, Under Milk Wood directed by Andrew Sinclair, was released in 1972, and another adaptation of the play, directed by Pip Broughton, was staged for television for the 60 anniversary in 2014.
An omniscient narrator invites the audience to listen to the dreams and innermost thoughts of the inhabitants of the fictional small Welsh fishing village, Llareggub.
They include Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard, relentlessly nagging her two dead husbands; Captain Cat, reliving his seafaring times; the two Mrs. Dai Breads; Organ Morgan, obsessed with his music; and Polly Garter, pining for her dead lover. Later, the town awakens and, aware now of how their feelings affect whatever they do, we watch them go about their daily business.
Analysis
Analysis
Darkness in literature: Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas - The Guardian
Techniques
Techniques
This play is rich in evocative language, often playful and surreal. You could consider the use of imagery, unusual juxtapositions of words and thoughts, the poetry of the piece, and the way the voices are interwoven to build up a tapestry of thoughts and actions. Think too about how humour and comedy are important to the effect and intentions of the play.
It uses dissonance, alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, personification, compound adjectives and similes to achieve its dramatic effects.
Consider how Thomas describes places and uses images, metaphors and adjectives in powerful and creative combination as the story moves back and forth between characters’ dreams and then their waking life. Intriguingly, the play also draws on Thomas’ experience during World War Two writing scripts and he uses some of the language of screenplays to suggest a particular focus on characters and places. Just as we might talk about a close-up in a film, in Under Milk Wood Thomas uses phrases such as ‘Closer now’ and ‘Closer still’.
More than sixty characters appear in the story and each of them is distinct in terms of what they say and what they do. The play is a comedy and one that reveals aspects of provincial, small town life, far from the cities of Britain. As in so many of Thomas’s poems, the play explores the subjects of birth and death. Is there any subject more common to all of us?
Past Essay Questions:
Past Essay Questions:
2019: (Under Milk Wood returns to the syllabus)
2019: (Under Milk Wood returns to the syllabus)
Infantile, idiotically comic, yet strangely moving.
To what extent does this view align with your understanding of Under Milk Wood?
In your response, make close reference to your prescribed text.
2000:
2000:
‘Under Milk Wood reveals, but does not condemn, human weakness.’ Discuss.
1999:
1999:
Discuss the dramatic treatment of the cyclic struggle for existence in Under Milk Wood.
1998:
1998:
‘Life is but a dream.’
Is life celebrated, or only the illusion of it, in Under Milk Wood?
1997:
1997:
Under Milk Wood, a play for voices, was written for radio. How does the play engage its audience?
1996:
1996:
Do you think Under Milk Wood is serious or a send-up? Give your reasons.
Earlier:
Purpose
Purpose
Dylan Thomas wrote Under Milk Wood to be a play for voices, using the intricate words of English combined with his regional Welsh culture to create a sing-song snapshot of life in an idyllic, rural village. Dylan wrote the play in fragmented snippets in order to capture the experience of moving about a town and hearing different sounds and voices of the villagers living their lives.
In 1943 Thomas outlined his idea about a mad village, where the town believes itself to be the only place of sanity in a mad world. WW2 was for Thomas a death of innocence. In this sense the play endeavours to resurrect a sense of innocence and common humanity anchored by goodness. Thomas writes: 'Artists, as far as I can gather, have set out, however unconsciously, to prove one of two things: either that they are mad in a sane world, or that they are sane in a mad world.' (Dylan Thomas, Jan 1934, to Trevor Hughes). For Thomas, aspects of the quotidian (the everyday) that connect community was worthy of pursuit in writing.
Audience
Audience
The audience for this play was originally entirely hearing it over the airwaves, after the BBC commissioned Dylan Thomas to write their radio play. It was later adapted to the stage and screen, including several movies. In modern times, the play has found new audiences in Zoom groups emulating the fragmented nature of the voices of the small country town. Broadly, Thomas aimed his work at those who loved poetry, wordplay, silliness and the sing-song interactions of the Welsh.
Under Milk Wood asks its audience to observe the internal workings of a close knit Welsh community. Like Thomas himself, the audience is situated as an outsider. From this perspective, the audience listens to and visualises his reflection on community life. Thomas' descriptive lyrical prose reveals the sentimental and the humour of the town as well as what it means to be Welsh in a close knit community. Anyone who enjoys the words, sounds and rhythms of the English language being used in an unusual and evocative but still accessible manner will appreciate this play.
Radio drama - experimenting with new forms of drama - many more characters - shorter length and perhaps more adult themes and innuendo for parents listening around the wireless/radio
The play became a bestseller when it was posthumously published as a book and its word-play and linguistic invention make it ideal for students of spoken English to explore, challenging though the text might sometimes be
Context
Context
Dylan Thomas wrote Under Milk Wood in the years leading up to his death in 1953, after being commissioned by the BBC to create a drama they could broadcast on the radio, which was still a relatively new mass medium. Dylan Thomas had Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "And death shall have no dominion"; and stories and radio broadcasts such as A Child's Christmas in Wales and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. He became widely popular in his lifetime and remained so after his premature death at the age of 39 in New York City. By then he had acquired a reputation, which he had encouraged, as a "roistering, drunken and doomed poet".
The play was developed in the years before and after World War Two, and its impact casts a large enough shadow across literature for its time period. A Modernist reading of Under Milk Wood embraces an understanding of Thomas' need for earnest and intricate depictions of the truly fragmented nature of human experiences and life in general.
Thomas is reported to have commented that Under Milk Wood was developed in response to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, as a way of reasserting the evidence of beauty in the world. It is also thought that the play was a response by Thomas both to the Nazi concentration camps, and to the internment camps that had been created around Britain during World War II.
Values
Values
This play celebrates life, humanity, and the inherent complexity of the human experience. It critiques and pokes fun at social stereotypes, including gender roles for men and women, religious piety and sexual freedoms and frustrations.
As for his fellow humans, Thomas aimed to capture their beauty as well as their darkness, eccentricity, and even deviance, in order to perhaps reflect the complex moral hypocrisies in his audience.
Purpose
Purpose
Audience
Audience
Context
Context
Seeds of the play go back to 1932 - Thomas discussed the idea for the play with his friends from Laugharne
Significantly, Thomas wrote the play in the aftermath of World War Two (around 1949) and fascinatingly the play is perhaps partly inspired by an abandoned long poem he had been working on entitled In Country Heaven. Perhaps surprisingly, this was to have been a poem with the subject of life after a globally destructive event. In World War Two, Thomas had observed the cruelty with which people can act towards each other. For him, the war marked some kind of death of innocence and scholars have observed that his creative challenge was to try and recreate a sense of innocence and common humanity anchored by goodness.
Values
Values
Themes are village life, community, relationships, the passing of time, the sea, religion, and nature. These are all viewed through the behavior and antics of the characters and are sometimes expressed by the narrators. Just as important as these themes is the language itself—rich, evocative, and sometimes surreal, this play is as much about the joy of language and technique as the circumstances of the characters’ lives.
Themes in Under Milk Wood
Themes in Under Milk Wood
Time
Time
Time is moving on through the play–it is the day in one life in Milk Wood–however the dreams and inner thoughts of the characters flit from past to present (Evans the death dreaming about ‘upon waking fifty years ago’ and Captain Cat flitting from the past with his ‘dead dears’ and the present)
Mr Waldo’s dream also keeps shuffling between the past (Mr Waldo as a young boy) and the present and the past (as a married man) and the present as ‘widower Waldo’
Scene 1 (the dreams) then closes with Lord Cut Glass imitating a clock ‘tick tock tick tock…’ –which ends the scene nicely and emphasises the theme of time
Captain Cat also lives between the past and the present– fully living as if both were his reality–this defeating time in some ways ‘Like a Cat he sees in the dark. Through the voyages of his tears he sails to see the dead’
People going to work, the shops opening
Students going to school
‘Babies and old men are cleaned and put into their prams’ – This quote gives the idea of the circle of life and that nothing changes - the time follows the same pattern of everyday life as if it is ‘out of time’
‘the hands of the clocks stayed still at half past eleven for fifty years’ –This is a pub that doesn’t care about the laws of when it can open and close and not/can sell alcohol –always open the clock is stuck on opening hours –also gives the feel that in the village time isn’t really a worry –time is always stuck
They have always done the same thing –time is always on repeat as they are not touched by the outside world–timelessness
Lord Cut-Glass who is seen as having an ostensible obsession with time. Thomas portrays the inevitable march of time as Lord Cut Glass is seen as living in “a house and a life at siege”, yet his eccentric character, as seen in Thomas’ use of unpredictable sentence patterning reinforced with exclamatory sentences in “-mind there-Rover!” emphasises the ironic nature of Glass’ behaviour as he is driven by time in a place where there is effectively ‘no time’.
The constant progression of time as a major theme in Under Milk Wood is also apparent as it is said to death to all “creatures born to die”.
This rather cynical view proposed by the Reverend Eli Jenkins highlights the ever-present presence of God’s ‘kind’ judgement as Jenkins prays to “let us see another day!”
Llareggub as a ‘chosen land’
Llareggub as a ‘chosen land’
Idyllic and happy place with no judgement–First Voice and Rev Eli –Jenkins don’t say anything judgmental but just takes Llareggub as it is
‘A god –built garden…a green leaved sermon on the innocence of men’ –Refer to Mary Ann Sailors that says that Llareggub is like the ‘chosen land’
Everyone knows each other in the town–the time follows the same pattern of everyday life as if it is ‘out of time’
There are many references to the garden of Eden in the play
There is a sense of ‘ joyful naughtiness’
‘Love, sings the spring. The bedspring grass bounces under the birds bums and lambs’– picturesque scene, untouched by the outside world –maybe Dylan Thomas looking back nostalgically
However there is gossip and it is judgmental ‘there’s a nasty lot that live here come to think of it’
The Exuberance of Life
The Exuberance of Life
A passage of time from birth, childhood, love and longing, marriage, old age and death –all wonders of
everyday life and all parts of life’s rich pattern
Love and the way that the characters enjoy or endure it –Mog Edwards and Myfanwy Price both rejoice in their ‘relationship’ which they can enjoy through dreams and letters –this strange way of showing their love is celebrated by the play –this is how they want their relationship to be
Luke Bartolo Review
Luke Bartolo Review
Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas
What is it: In the Welsh fishing village of Llareggub (read it backwards) the townsfolk awaken from their slumber, shake off the night's dreams, and go about their daily business. In Llareggub this isn't just one morning, it's all mornings, and the village people remember their lives and reminisce on their hopes, their dreams, their routines, until the night comes again.
Scope for Study: Thomas' text is described as a 'play for voices', which alludes to its origins as a radio play, and students may need a moment or two to adjust to the unique format that the narrative takes. The author's background in poetry manifests in Under Milk Wood's wryly humourous, lyrically-constructed dialogue, and in the way each character's life story is succinctly expressed in verse. Analysis in the classroom would need to draw upon the Welsh and radio contexts, the author's use of symbolism and motifs related to the significance of the sea in the lives of the villagers, and the play's unusual structure.
Verdict: Once I got into the rhythm of Under Milk Wood I fell head over heels in love with Thomas' attempt to preserve a time and place for posterity with so much beautiful language. Whether it's the description of the "sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea" or the simple image of a horse with "seaweed on its hooves", Thomas has a gift for language that makes his tragic slide into an early, alcoholic grave feel all the more devastating. Under Milk Wood is a perfect text for Advanced English for two precise reasons. The first is that it's a challenging and rewarding literary experience that will be of great benefit to the students who parse and curate its poetry for their own pleasure. The second, and perhaps more important reason, is that its relatively brief length will allow for the fact that these high-achieving students have a lot on their plate in their HSC year without being expected to read a 300 page 19th century novel.
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