38 pages • 1 hour read
Dylan ThomasUnder Milk Wood
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1954A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Patterns of Existence
Under Milk Wood presents a day in the life of a small Welsh town. The events described in the play are not given a specific date or time. Rather, the implication is that this is a day like any other for the residents of Llareggub, whose lives follow predictable routines. Consequently, there is no real plot in Under Milk Wood. The point of the play is to elucidate the cyclical nature of existence in the small town, and the meaning the characters derive from it.
Many of the residents of Llareggub take comfort in the routine nature of their lives. Dai Bread chastises his two wives when they do not have his food ready, as he is so dependent on his routine existence. Myfanwy Price and Mog Edwards are caught in their same romantic pattern, trapped by their fear of manifesting their love in anything other than letters. Each night, Jack Black puts on his special trousers and chases lovers through Milk Wood. He sees himself as an agent of good, chasing the immoral sinners from their den of iniquity. He feels comforted by the idea that he is—at the very least—doing something to encourage morality in the town, however ineffectual he might be. Each day, these characters repeat the patterns of their existence. The patterns become the foundation of both their lives and their sense of self. They cannot imagine existence any other way.
While some characters take pleasure in the simplicity of their lives, others are caught in oppressive, destructive cycles. For years, Polly Garter has struggled to cope with the death of the only man she ever loved, Little Willy Weazel. His death traumatized her, and she still sings about how he was different from every other man. Since his death, she has tried to deal with her grief through a string of unsatisfying romantic affairs. While these relationships have produced scandal and children, they have not diminished the grief Polly feels in Willy’s absence. She is caught in a pattern in which she seeks comfort from other romantic partners to distract herself from her pain. This pattern also causes her to be socially ostracized by the judgmental people of Llareggub, but Polly cannot break free of it. Polly’s character is an example of how traumatic events can influence the patterns of everyday life in ways that are ultimately more damaging than helpful. However, Polly’s story ends on an optimistic note, suggesting that this unhelpful pattern may be reaching its end. In Mr. Waldo, Polly has finally found someone who may be able to sympathize with her pain, helping her move beyond it, even if he cannot truly heal it.
Hiraeth and Nostalgia
Hiraeth is a Welsh word with no direct translation in English. It refers to a mixture of homesickness and nostalgia, a sadness for a place that is gone and a yearning to return to a place that is now unreachable. Hiraeth is a foundational element of a great deal of Welsh cultural output, especially literature. Under Milk Wood explores ideas of nostalgia, particularly given the context in which the play was written. The town of Llareggub is a pastiche of a typical Welsh coastal village. The name mimics the Welsh language’s use of double-L letter formations and is made by writing “bugger all” (a vulgar British slang term for nothing of note) backward. In a way, the nostalgia of the play is parodic, as its object is an unremarkable, old-fashioned town. Dylan Thomas’s own experience of small Welsh coastal towns taught him of their social ostracization from the rest of post-war Britain, seemingly cut off in a cultural and material sense from the wider world and producing insular, self-sustaining communities. On the surface, Under Milk Wood parodies the idea of hiraeth by deriding the isolation and absurdity of a small town. On a deeper level, however, the careful sketches of life in the community create a more nuanced nostalgia.
The nostalgia of Under Milk Wood is bittersweet. The characters seem caught in a place that is out of time. From an outsider’s perspective, this is a town in decline. The Voice of a Guide-Book describes the economic decay of Llareggub and Wales as a whole, suggesting that this way of life is precarious and doomed to vanish. However, the townspeople are able to find meaning in their seemingly parochial existence. Reverend Jenkins, for example, acknowledges that there may be lovelier or wealthier or more important towns, but he would not swap Llareggub for any of them. His town is one in which schoolchildren bicker over sweets and kisses, where lovers sneak away to the woods after dark, and where the past is repeated over and over again. The characters’ old traditions contrast with the rapid industrial and social development of mid-century Britain, creating a sense of hiraeth. The play expresses a nostalgia for a certain idea of Wales, one that—due to the encroachment of modernity—will soon vanish forever. For all the intensity of their love and passion, for the seemingly endless nature of their daily routines, the people of Llareggub live tragic lives. Everything they know, believe, and love is in danger. Eventually, the idiosyncrasies of their lives will be subsumed into the broader culture of the modern world. The hiraeth in the play exists in the minds of the audience, who are shown a version of Wales to which they can no longer return.
Even within the play itself, however, the depiction of nostalgia is nuanced. For all Reverend Jenkins’s declarations of love for Llareggub, there are those who are haunted by the past. Each night, Captain Cat is visited by the ghosts of drowned sailors. He sees his former love, Rosie Probert, who feels as though she is fading from existence until she can no longer remember herself. For Captain Cat, remembering is a duty, one as vital as it is painful. He cannot think of the past without thinking of everyone he has lost, but he forces himself to remember because he feels the alternative, forgetting, is even more terrible. Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard meets with her two dead husbands each night and settles into a familiar routine of nagging them to go about their chores. She cannot stop, even though this nagging may have driven the men into earlier graves. Nostalgia for the past can cause pain in the present, creating an inescapable trap for the living.
The Nature of Storytelling
Under Milk Wood has no traditional plot. Instead, it is about the nature of stories themselves. The narrative takes place over a single day, portraying night, morning, afternoon, and evening. Within the day, the characters act and interact, but their behavior does not follow the expectations of a traditional narrative structure. There is no climax or denouement, simply the end of another day. Within this vague structure, however, a hundred smaller stories take place and become the important narrative threads of the play: the unconsummated love of Myfanwy Price and Mog Edward, Cherry Owen’s drunken escapades, Jack Black’s moral crusades in Milk Wood. Many of these narrative threads are about stories themselves. The relationship between Myfanwy and Mog, for example, is built on stories, in which they tell each other tales of how they might live. Jack tells a story in which he weeds out the sinners of Milk Wood and exposes their debauchery. Everyone else ignores Jack’s story, yet he tells it again each night. Each morning, Cherry wakes up with no memories of his previous night and delights in hearing his wife’s stories about his antics. These stories give purpose, meaning, and tension to people whose lives are marked by stasis.
Reverend Jenkins recognizes the importance of stories to life in Llareggub. He is writing a book to document life in the town for the sake of posterity. He has fashioned himself into a narrator, as he believes that even the most seemingly inconsequential inhabitant of Llareggub is deserving of documentation. His life is given purpose by telling the stories of others, regardless of who they might be or what they might have accomplished. In writing The White Book of Llareggub, Jenkins questions a fundamental aspect of storytelling: who chooses which stories are to be told and why. Furthermore, the decision to include every single inhabitant turns these seemingly disparate lives into a coherent narrative of the town itself. The life of a community is woven from many threads; the story of Llareggub is actually the summation of the many different stories of those who live there.
The nature of storytelling is also explored through the rotating cast of narrators. First Voice and Second Voice are the main narrators. They are omniscient, existing outside the community. This detachment gives them a sense of objectivity, in that they are not biased by their personal relationships with any of the inhabitants (though they show their biases in other ways). This form of storytelling is set aside briefly when Captain Cat is allowed to take over the role of narrator. His narration is very different. Captain Cat’s story about Llareggub is built entirely from his subjective experiences as a member of the community. His blindness has compelled him to pay particular attention to those around him, and he has come to understand the world primarily through sound, which influences the way he tells his story. These sounds tell him what is happening, and he shares these stories with the audience. The contrast between the different modes of storytelling parallels the contrast between the different lived experiences of the people of Llareggub.
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