Under Milk Wood – Critical appreciation (2000 words)
Completed just before the author's death in 1953, ‘Under Milk Wood’ is an expression of Dylan Thomas's sense of the wonderful variety of life. It is a play for voices, which was commissioned by the BBC to be broadcast on the radio. This meant that the spoken word had to convey everything because there were no actors on a stage, no scenery, no props and no lighting. It is a moving and hilarious account of a spring day in a small Welsh fishing village. It begins with the dreams of the sleepers before dawn, moves through the brilliant, noisy day of the townspeople and closes as "the rain of dusk brings on the bawdy night."
The town in which 'Under Milk Wood' is set is called Llareggub, which is bugger all backwards, which mischievously suggests not much goes on in the town. Under Milk Wood has been described by some critics as a black comedy but, in my opinion, this interpretation misses the true message of the play. Thomas himself described his intentions for the piece very clearly in a letter to Countess Caetani. It was to be ‘an impression for voices, an entertainment ….. of the town I live in and to write it simply and warmly and comically with lots of movement and va

Here Thomas is using informal words and phrases to create a natural-sounding dialogue, i.e. ‘la di da’ meaning that Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard is a snob. He also uses incompleteness; ‘got a man’ which misses out the auxiliary verb to create a sense of realistic dialogue.

The play derives its power from the fact that his montage of microscopic scenes achieves a convincing unity as the scenes unfold in all their variety and energy to present a grand and forceful image of the perennial human comedy.

· Walters, Colin. “Angel or Bad Boy, The Poet Dylan Thomas.” The Washington Times. 14 Jan. 2001, p.6.

Thomas’ own childhood has been extensively written about. The boy who later became the most famous poet of Wales was the product of two directly opposed natures and cultures. Despite early maternal guidance, Dylan was influenced most strongly by his hot-tempered father, who refused to have Welsh even spoken in the house. David John Thomas adored the poetic language of Shakespeare, which he often recited to his son. These sonorous recitations undoubtedly had a lasting effect on Dylan. Long before he began writing, he fell in love with words. From the beginning, there was not much doubt about Dylan's future career; he decided he was going to be a writer at a young age. His father's constant efforts to involve Dylan in English literature, at the highest level, were bound to bear fruit. The only subject in which Dylan was interested, and indeed the only one at which he excelled, was English.

It is over-emotional verse that exaggerates sound in expressing the commonplace. Thomas achieves this effect by overdoing some poetic techniques and using too much description (pleonasm); ‘boskier woods’ this basically means woodier woods. He also over repeats some words ‘And boskier’, ‘And bright’, ‘And sweeter’. He also over alliterates ‘boskier’, ‘blithe’, ‘bright’, ‘birds’, ‘bards’ and ‘beauteous’. The rhythm of the poem is also too regular, which creates boredom.

Childhood for example is more realistically presented in the drama than anywhere else in Thomas. The Reverend Eli Jenkins remembers sadly the drunken father of his boyhood. Mr Waldo sings of his childhood. And there are wonderful descriptions of the children of the town tumbling out of school: ‘Captain Cat at his curtained schooner's porthole open to the Spring sun tides hears the naughty forfeiting children tumble and rhyme on the cobbles...