Extract from Under Milk Wood, by Dylan Thomas
Under Milk Wood – An Extract
By Dylan Thomas
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. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night 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 glowworms 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-beforedawn 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 Llaregyb Hill, dewfall, starfall, 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 lofts like a mouse with gloves; in Dai Bread’s bakery flying like black flour. It is to-night in Donkey Street, trotting silent, With seaweed on its hooves, along the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot, text and trinket, harmonium, holy dresser, watercolours 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 coms. 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.
Tarras
It is winter, early morning in the little township, chilled and blackfrosted, the plants and bushes stiffly frozen, the football field icy, the trees carrying crystals of sharp ice up to the wet sodden air-hugging mist.
Listen. It is morning quietly roving the main road, the moist melodic streaming mist rising over the garage and the schoolhouse. It is grass shivering on the hill. Sunrise, dawn, the chorus of birds in the pinetrees.
It is Sunday morning. The thin clear slants of sun echo back onto the thick mist. In the silver windowed house, the parents sleep heavy while three blanketed children toss and turn. In the workshop of the garage, Joe is up and in his practical oil-stained overalls is working on that ute that the farmer needs today. Back in the house, the children now sit heavy-eyed around the wooden rectangular table.
And the toast burns as the jug boils.
“Hurry up kids, we’ll be late,” Mum shouts, sharp tongued. Washed and combed and brushed, families drive the short way to the little church on the hill. Past the swamp where the dragonflies shimmer and hover in the morning sunlight. Where the captured tadpoles would have grown into glazed green slippery little frogs.
Look. On the hill behind the house the pinetrees lift their heavy branches of sharp dense needles into the dwindling disappearing time-now-over mist. Down below in the township, the little general store opens its ready-for-anything doors to sell soap to biscuits, flour, tea towels, light bulbs and milk that will arrive later in the day carried for hours on the bus.
And soon you will be sitting on hard straight-backed wooden pews with no cushions. The tiny white wooden church echoing with the sound of morning hymns, streaming out into the frosty but now sunstreaked morning.
This piece of writing is an evocative description of one moment in time. Your task today is to create a piece of writing that describes an instant in a place you know, borrowing the following features from Dylan Thomas’ writing:
- It must be in the Second Person Viewpoint
- It must appeal to a range of the senses (Pay particular attention to the sections that start with the imperatives: “Listen”, or “Look”)
- It must use some from the following list of figurative language:
- Alliteration
- Metaphor
- Simile
- Personification
- Repetition
- Listing
