I’ve fallen so far behind with these posts that my memory of Under Milk Wood is of lying in the garden on one of the last really hot days of summer, drinking a long cold drink, listening to the swearing exasperated sounds of my neighbours moving out of the flat upstairs and luxuriating in the fantastic use of language on these pages.

I don’t think I’ve ever come across anything more joyfully written. There’s love and attention in every word, every tiny line that sketches the inhabitants of a Welsh village, its houses and landscape.

We start before they wake up, we follow them throughout the day and we go to sleep after they do. We come to love them as much as Thomas did.

They’re sometimes flawed people and they seem to live more in their daydreams than in reality. Sometimes the dreams are happy things, like Dai Bread the baker’s harem, or they can be traumatic, like Mr Pugh’s murder fantasies or Mrs Willy Nilly’s punishments.

The names are cartoonish and comic, the verses could have been patronising and twee but they’re never anything but wonderful.

It’s difficult to read the words without Richard Burton popping into your head once in a while, especially passages with a lot of Rs in them, but that can’t be a bad thing, can it.

This edition dispenses with the stage directions to have first voice and second voice dividing the narrative. The intorduction explains that they didn’t want to interrupt the flow by making you read ‘First voice’ and ‘Second voice’ however many times it would have been, and that in spoken form the change of tone isn’t such a split. I’m not so sure about that and would have appreciated the cue to separate the speakers

First voice often gives background, then second voice takes over when the specifics of a dream or a conversation are entered into, so you go from description of concepts to facts when you hear the difference. For example, compare the way you read these two passages, first with stage directions, then uninterrupted.

FIRST VOICE

From where you are you can hear in Cockle Row in the spring, moonless night, Miss Price, dressmaker and sweetshop-keeper, dream of

SECOND VOICE

her lover, tall as the town clock tower, Samsonsyrup-gold-maned, whacking thighed and piping hot, thunderbolt-bass’d and barnacle-breasted, flailing up the cockles with his eyes like blowlamps and scooping low over her lonely loving hotwaterbottled body.

Or, without first and second voices:

From where you are you can hear in Cockle Row in the spring, moonless night, Miss Price, dressmaker and sweetshop-keeper, dream of her lover, tall as the town clock tower, Samsonsyrup-gold-maned, whacking thighed and piping hot, thunderbolt-bass’d and barnacle-breasted, flailing up the cockles with his eyes like blowlamps and scooping low over her lonely loving hotwaterbottled body.

Loses a bit, don’t you think? I get the point that as an audio piece we wouldn’t hear a voice say ‘Second voice’ as we would reading it to ourselves, but I think you’d skip over the actual words after a few times, just taking the shape as a change marker. Still pretty marvellous though.

Watever you do with your life, make sure that at least one day of it is spent reading Under Milk Wood.

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