by Dylan Thomas
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, 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 nanny-goats, 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 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.
Captain Cat, the retired blind seacaptain, asleep in his bunk in the seashelled, ship-in-bottled, shipshape best cabin of Schooner House dreams of
never such seas as any that swamped the decks of his S.S. Kidwelly bellying over the bedclothes and jellyfish-slippery sucking him down salt deep into the Davy dark where the fish come biting out and nibble him down to his wishbone, and the long drowned nuzzle up to him.
FIRST DROWNED
Remember me, Captain?
CAPTAIN CAT
You’re Dancing Williams!
FIRST DROWNED
I lost my step in Nantucket.
SECOND DROWNED
Do you see me, Captain? the white bone talking? I’m Tom-Fred the donkeyman… we shared the same girl once… her name was Mrs Probert…
WOMAN’S VOICE
Rosie Probert, thirty three Duck Lane. Come on up, boys, I’m dead.
THIRD DROWNED
Hold me, Captain, I’m Jonah Jarvis, come to a bad end, very enjoyable…
FOURTH DROWNED
Alfred Pomeroy Jones, sealawyer, born in Mumbles, sung like a linnet, crowned you with a flagon, tattooed with mermaids, thirst like a dredger, died of blisters.
FIRST DROWNED
This skull at your earhole is
FIFTH DROWNED
Curly Bevan. Tell my auntie it was me that pawned the ormolu clock…
CAPTAIN CAT
Aye, aye, Curly.
SECOND DROWNED
Tell my missus no I never
THIRD DROWNED
I never done what she said I never…
FOURTH DROWNED
Yes, they did.
FIFTH DROWNED
And who brings coconuts and shawls and parrots to my Gwen now?
FIRST DROWNED
How’s it above?
SECOND DROWNED
Is there rum and lavabread?
THIRD DROWNED
Bosoms and robins?
FOURTH DROWNED
Concertinas?
FIFTH DROWNED
Ebenezer’s bell?
FIRST DROWNED
Fighting and onions?
SECOND DROWNED
And sparrows and daisies?
THIRD DROWNED
Tiddlers in a jamjar?
FOURTH DROWNED
Buttermilk and whippets?
FIFTH DROWNED
Rock-a-bye baby?
FIRST DROWNED
Washing on the line?
SECOND DROWNED
And old girls in the snug?
THIRD DROWNED
How’s the tenors in Dowlais?
FOURTH DROWNED
Who milks the cows in Maesgwyn?
FIFTH DROWNED
When she smiles, is there dimples?
FIRST DROWNED
What’s the smell of parsley?
CAPTAIN CAT
Oh, my dead dears!
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, Samson-syrup-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.
MR EDWARDS
Myfanwy Price!
MISS PRICE
Mr Mog Edwards!
MR EDWARDS
I am a draper mad with love. I love you more than all the flannelette and calico, candlewick, dimity, crash and merino, tussore, cretonne, crépon, muslin, poplin, ticking and twill in the whole Cloth Hall of the world. I have come to take you away to my Emporium on the hill, where the change hums on wires. Throw away your little bedsocks and your Welsh wool knitted jacket, I will warm the sheets like an electric toaster, I will lie by your side like the Sunday roast…
MISS PRICE
I will knit you a wallet of forget-me-not blue, for the money to be comfy. I will warm your heart by the fire so that you can slip it in under your vest when the shop is closed…
MR EDWARDS
Myfanwy, Myfanwy, before the mice gnaw at your bottom drawer will you say
MISS PRICE
Yes, Mog, yes, Mog, yes, yes, yes…
MR EDWARDS
And all the bells of the tills of the town shall ring for our wedding.
[Noise of money-tills and chapel bells]
Come now, drift up the dark, come up the drifting sea-dark street now in the dark night seesawing like the sea, to the bible-black airless attic over Jack Black the cobbler’s shop where alone and savagely Jack Black sleeps in a nightshirt tied to his ankles with elastic and dreams of
chasing the naughty couples down the grassgreen gooseberried double bed of the wood, flogging the tosspots in the spit-and-sawdust, driving out the bare bold girls from the sixpenny hops of his nightmares.
JACK BLACK [Loudly]
Ach y fi!
Ach y fi!
Evans the Death, the undertaker,
EVANS THE DEATH
laughs high and aloud in his sleep and curls up his toes as he sees, upon waking fifty years ago, snow lie deep on the goosefield behind the sleeping house; and he runs out into the field where his mother is making welshcakes. in the snow, and steals a fistful of snowflakes and currants and climbs back to bed to eat them cold and sweet under the warm, white clothes while his mother dances in the snow kitchen crying out for her lost currants.
And in the little pink-eyed cottage next to the undertaker’s, lie, alone, the seventeen snoring gentle stone of Mister Waldo, rabbitcatcher, barber, herbalist, catdoctor, quack, his fat pink hands, palms up, over the edge of the patchwork quilt, his black boots neat and tidy in the washing-basin, his bowler on a nail above the bed, a milk stout and a slice of cold bread pudding under the pillow; and, dripping in the dark, he dreams of
MOTHER
This little piggy went to market
This little piggy stayed at h
ome
This little piggy had roast beef
This little piggy had none
And this little piggy went
LITTLE BOY
wee wee wee wee wee
MOTHER
all the way home to
WIFE [Screaming]
Waldo! Wal-do!
MR WALDO
Yes, Blodwen love?
WIFE
Oh, what’ll the neighbours say, what’ll the neighbours…
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
Poor Mrs Waldo
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
What she puts up with
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
Never should of married
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
If she didn’t had to
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
Same as her mother
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
There’s a husband for you
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
Bad as his father
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
And you know where he ended
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
Up in the asylum
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
Crying for his ma
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
Every Saturday
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
He hasn’t got a leg
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
And carrying on
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
With that Mrs Beattie Morris
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
Up in the quarry
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
And seen her baby
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
It’s got his nose
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
Oh, it makes my heart bleed
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
What he’ll do for drink
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
He sold the pianola
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
And her sewing machine
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
Falling in the gutter
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
Talking to the lamp-post
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
Using language
FIRST NEIGHBOUR
Singing in the w.
SECOND NEIGHBOUR
Poor Mrs Waldo
WIFE [Tearfully]
Oh, Waldo, Waldo!
MR WALDO
Hush, love, hush. I’m widower Waldo now.
MOTHER [Screaming]
Waldo, Wal-do!
LITTLE BOY
Yes, our mum?
MOTHER
Oh, what’ll the neighbours say, what’ll the neighbours…
THIRD NEIGHBOUR
Black as a chimbley
FOURTH NEIGHBOUR
Ringing doorbells
THIRD NEIGHBOUR
Breaking windows
FOURTH NEIGHBOUR
Making mudpies
THIRD NEIGHBOUR
Stealing currants
FOURTH NEIGHBOUR
Chalking words
THIRD NEIGHBOUR
Saw him in the bushes
FOURTH NEIGHBOUR
Playing mwchins
THIRD NEIGHBOUR
Send him to bed without any supper
FOURTH NEIGHBOUR
Give him sennapods and lock him in the dark
THIRD NEIGHBOUR
Off to the reformatory
FOURTH NEIGHBOUR
Off to the reformatory
TOGETHER
Learn him with a slipper on his b.t.m.
ANOTHER MOTHER [Screaming]
Waldo, Wal-do! What you doing with our Matti?
LITTLE BOY
Give us a kiss, Matti Richards.
LITTLE GIRL
Give us a penny then.
MR WALDO
I only got a halfpenny.
FIRST WOMAN
Lips is a penny.
PREACHER
Will you take this woman Matti Richards
SECOND WOMAN
Dulcie Prothero
THIRD WOMAN
Effie Bevan
FOURTH WOMAN
Lil the Gluepot
FIFTH WOMAN
Mrs Flusher
WIFE
Blodwen Bowen
PREACHER
To be your awful wedded wife
LITTLE BOY [Screaming]
No, no, no!
Now, in her iceberg-white, holily laundered crinoline nightgown, under virtuous polar sheets, in her spruced and scoured dust-defying bedroom in trig and trim Bay View, a house for paying guests at the top of the town, Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, widow, twice, of Mr Ogmore, linoleum, retired, and Mr Pritchard, failed bookmaker, who maddened by besoming, swabbing and scrubbing, the voice of the vacuum-cleaner and the fume of polish, ironically swallowed disinfectant, fidgets in her rinsed sleep, wakes in a dream, and nudges in the ribs dead Mr Ogmore, dead Mr Pritchard, ghostly on either side.
MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD
Mr Ogmore!
Mr Pritchard!
It is time to inhale your balsam.
MR OGMORE
Oh, Mrs Ogmore!
MR PRITCHARD
Oh, Mrs Pritchard!
MRS PRITCHARD
Soon it will be time to get up.
Tell me your tasks, in order.
MR OGMORE
I must put my pyjamas in the drawer marked pyjamas.
MR PRITCHARD
I must take my cloth bath which is good for me.
MR OGMORE
I must wear my flannel band to ward off sciatica.
MR PRITCHARD
I must dress behind the curtain and put on my apron.
MR OGMORE
I must blow my nose.
MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD
in the garden, if you please.
MR OGMORE
In a piece of tissue-paper which I afterwards bum.
MR PRITCHARD
I must take my salts which are nature’s friend.
MR OGMORE
I must boil the drinking water because of germs.