Dylan Thomas -- Under Milk Wood

Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. 

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 tonight 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 jollyrodgered sea. And the

anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the

wetnosed 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, dew fall, star fall, 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, sucking mintoes, fortywinking hallelujah;

night in the four-ale, quiet as a domino; in Ocky Milkman's loft like a mouse with gloves; in Dai Bread's

bakery flying like black flour. It is tonight in Donkey Street, trotting silent, with seaweed on its

hooves, along the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot, text and trinket, harmonium, holy dresser,

watercolors 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 through 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.