Observe the images posters for Under Milk Wood.

Consider : what is the play about; what issues, events might it contain?

UNDER MILK WOOD – A ‘PLAY FOR VOICES’ DYLAN THOMAS

• Finished writing in New York, 1953• Worked on it for several (20) years• First performed BBC January 1954• Setting, time of day, characters suggestive of T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land with a less depressing perspective

UNDER MILK WOOD Describes a day in the life of the fictional town of Llareggub (Thomas' favorite joke-the name is actually a vulgarepithet "B… r all" spelled backwards).Interpretation UNDER MILK WOOD – characters playing their parts directly as if from the mouth of actual people delivering lines with pieces of verbal flamboyance – clever juggling of language

Writer/poet Dylan Thomas was possessed of the unique ability to communicate the sound as well as the sense of words put together in memorable combinations

Stylistically speaking : a dreamlike world that emphasizes the connection between life and death inherent in many of Thomas‘

works. There is no great divide between life or death – characters speak to us from the dead just as the poet

himself speaks to his readers/listeners (viewers) The locations are deliberately unspecified - although we are aware that the voices represent a specific

social milieu. ABIGUITY – a deliberate strategy to emphasize how the piece speaks to everyone across time and

space.

Under Milk WoodA ‘play for voices’ – Dylan Thomasfinished writing play New York, 1953. • worked on it for several (20) years.

First performed – BBC in January 1954.

Observe the image, what do you think the play might contain or be about?

Location • seaside town - ‘Llareggub’ (an expression of frustration written backwards)

• Slightly autobiographic work • Laugharne and New Quay – where Dylan Thomas had a

home

Laugharne

New Quay

Setting –> Characters• The play focuses on the town in the early morning

characters who live and have lived there • Blind Captain Cat is the main character sees his dead friends

in his dreams.• “… farmers, the fishers, … the undertaker and the fancy

woman, drunkard, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives, …”

• Unfolding of the lives of the various townsfolk, through their own voices the audience jumps into their thoughts: listens in on their routines, their dreams, memories, secrets

• Sometimes we catch a glimpse of complexities of human relationships bringing to slightly humorous considerations

• New perspective of the pervasive depth of an audio-aural voice only narration – almost primordial in intensity ancient story-telling technique to captivate the audience. Intense

Text Pt.1

Dylan Thomas is famous for change in the order of words in a phrase or sentence as wordplay.A t r a n s f e r r e d e p i t h e t - adjective placed with an incorrect noun or one that it cannot logically describe.from Under Milk Wood, “though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles”, snouting and velvet are adjectives – used to describe a mole, rather than a dingle – which is a dell or a wooded valley.IE. “the long and weary road” – the adjective long can logically describe a road, whereas a road cannot feel weary, so weary is the transferred epithet in this case Procol Harum: Shaking the Wrong Dice

• Vi l l a g e L l a r e g g u b p o p u l a t e d b y a c a s t o f d r u n k a r d s , p r o s t i t u t e s , u n r e q u i t e d l o v e r s , b i g a m i s t s a n d g h o s t s

• T h o m a s ’ s l i t e r a r y s t y l e i s u n i q u e e v e n i n t h i s s e m i - p r o s e r e n d e r i n g g a v e o n l y o n e d i r e c t i o n t o t h e c a s t – " l o v e t h e w o r d s , l o v e t h e w o r d s " , e m p h a s i z i n g h i s o b s e s s i o n w i t h t h e S O U N D o f w o r d s a b o v e a l l e l s e

• Only apparent simplicity of the work wide range of literary methods Thomas uses underpinning this masterpiece

Imitation of sound – onomatopoeia (Boo, hiss, squelch;) gives the prose texture and meaning – we can hear the sounds in the village.Lyrical use of alliteration technique of repeating a number of words the same sound, at the beginning of a phrase - bouncing baby boy; OR At the start of the play: "It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow".• RHYME AND RHYTHM, TRANSFERRED EPITHET, ASSONANCE a range of

other literary methods, to create a beautifully evocative picture of the village and its inhabitants

Listen

UNDER MILK WOOD – A ‘PLAY FOR VOICES’ DYLAN THOMAS

Use of clever literary devices to enhance language in all of Dylan Thomas’s works Under Milk Wood

'Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.’

Their words had forked no lightning