Original subtitles

To begin at the beginning:

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

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 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 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.

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.

Captain Cat, the retired blind sea-captain,

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.

Remember me, Captain? Dancing Williams!

I lost my step in Nantucket.

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...

Rosie Probert, thirty three Duck Lane.

Come on up, boys, I'm dead.

Hold me, Captain, I'm Jonah Jarvis.

Come to a bad end.

Come to a bad end.

Come to a bad end, very enjoyable.

Alfred Pomeroy Jones, sea-lawyer,

born in Mumbles, sung like a linnet,

crowned you with a flagon, tattooed with mermaids,

thirst like a dredger, died of blisters.

Come to a bad end.

Come to a bad end.

Come to a bad end, very enjoyable.

Hold me, Captain.

Hold me, Captain.

Hold me, Captain, I'm Jonah Jarvis.

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,

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.

Myfanwy Price!

Mr Mog 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, crepon, 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.

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.

Myfanwy, Myfanwy,

before the mice gnaw at your bottom drawer

will you say

Yes, Mog, yes, Mog, yes, yes, yes.

And all the bells of the tills of the town

shall ring for our wedding.

Come now, drift up the dark,

come up the drifting sea-dark street now in the dark night

seesawing like the sea,

And in the little pink-eyed cottage next to the undertaker's,

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

This little piggy went to market

This little piggy stayed at home

This little piggy had roast beef

This little piggy had none

And this little piggy went

wee wee wee wee wee

all the way home.

Waldo! Wal-do! - Yes, Blodwen love?

What'll the neighbours say, what'll the neighbours say?

Poor Mrs Waldo. - Never should of married.

If she didn't had to. - Same as her mother.

There's a husband for you. - Bad as his father.

And you know where he ended. - Up in the asylum.

Crying for his ma.

Every Saturday.

He hasn't got a leg. - And carrying on.

With that Mrs Beattie Morris. - Up in the quarry.

And seen her baby. - It's got his nose.

Oh it makes my heart bleed.

What he'll do for drink.

He sold the pianola. - And her sewing machine.

Falling in the gutter - Talking to the lamp-post

Using language - Black as a chimbley

Ringing doorbells

Breaking windows

Making mudpies

Stealing currants

Chalking words

Saw him in the bushes - Playing mwchins

Waldo, Wal-do!

I'm widower Waldo now.

Send him to bed without any supper

Give him sennapods and lock him in the dark

Off to the reformatory

Learn him with a slipper on his b.t.m.

Learn him with a slipper on his b.t.m.

Give us a kiss, Matti Richards.

Give us a penny then.

I only got a halfpenny.

Lips is a penny.

Will you take this woman Matti Richards

Dulcie Prothero

Effie Bevan

Lil the Gluepot

Mrs Flusher

Blodwen Bowen

To be your awful wedded wife

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,

You first, Mr Ogmore.

After you, Mr Pritchard.

No, no, Mr Ogmore. You widowed her first.

Husbands,

she says in her sleep.

There is acid love in her voice for one of the two shambling phantoms.

I love you both.

Oh, Mrs Ogmore.

Oh, Mrs Pritchard.

Soon it will be time to go to bed.

Tell me your tasks in order.

We must take our pyjamas from the drawer marked pyjamas.

And then you must take them off.

In Butcher Beynon's, Gossamer Beynon, daughter, schoolteacher,

dreaming deep, daintily ferrets

under a fluttering hummock of chicken's feathers

in a slaughterhouse that has chintz curtains and a three-pieced suite,

and finds, with no surprise, a small rough ready man

with a bushy tail winking in a paper carrier.

At last, my love,

sighs Gossamer Beynon.

And the bushy tail wags rude and ginger.

Help!

cries Organ Morgan, the organist, in his dream,

There is perturbation and music in Coronation Street!

All the spouses are honking like geese and the babies singing opera.

P.C. Attila Rees has got his truncheon out

and is playing cadenzas by the pump,

the cows from Sunday Meadow ring like reindeer,

and on the roof of Handel Villa

see the Women's Welfare hoofing, bloomered, in the moon.

At the sea-end of town, Mr and Mrs Floyd, the cocklers,

are sleeping as quiet as death, side by wrinkled side,

toothless, salt and brown, like two old kippers in a box.

Ocky Milkman, drowned asleep in Cockle Street,

is emptying his churns into the Dewi River,

regardless of expense,

and weeping like a funeral.

P.C. Attila Rees lumps out of bed, dead to the dark and still foghorning,

and drags out his helmet from under the bed;

but deep in the backyard lock-up of his sleep a mean voice murmurs

You'll be sorry for this in the morning,

and he heave-ho's back to bed. His helmet swashes in the dark.

Willy Nilly, postman, asleep up street,

walks fourteen miles to deliver the post

as he does every day of the night,

rat-a-tats hard and sharp on Mrs Willy Nilly.

Don't spank me, please, teacher,

whimpers his wife at his side,

but every night of her married life she has been late for school.

Sinbad Sailors, over the taproom of the Sailors Arms,

hugs his damp pillow

Gossamer Beynon.

And the Inspectors of Cruelty fly down into Mrs Butcher Brynon's dream

to persecute Mr Beynon for selling

owlmeat, dogs' eyes,

manchop.

Mr Beynon, in butcher's bloodied apron, spring-heels down Coronation Street,

a finger, not his own, in his mouth.

Straightfaced in his cunning sleep he pulls the legs of his dreams and

hunting on pigback

shoots down

the wild giblets.

My foxy darling.

Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers

in the streets rocked to sleep by the sea,

see the titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and bones,

ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings,

saliva and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams,

the wrecks and sprats and shells and fishbones,

whale-juice and moonshine and small salt fry dished up by the hidden sea.

The owls are hunting.

Look, over Bethesda gravestones

one hoots and swoops and catches a mouse by Hannah Rees, Beloved Wife.

And in Coronation Street, which you alone can see

it is so dark under the chapel in the skies,

the Reverend Eli Jenkins, poet, preacher,

turns in his deep towards-dawn sleep and dreams of

Eisteddfodau.

Mr Pugh, schoolmaster, fathoms asleep,

Murder.

Mrs Organ Morgan, groceress, coiled grey like a dormouse,

her paws to her ears, conjures

Silence!

She sleeps very dulcet in a cove of wool,

and trumpeting Organ Morgan at her side snores no louder than a spider.

Mary Ann Sailors dreams of

The Garden of Eden.

Away from the cool scrubbed cobbled kitchen

with the Sunday-school pictures on the whitewashed wall

and the farmers' almanac hung above the settle

and the sides of bacon on the ceiling hooks,

and goes down the cockleshelled paths of that applepie kitchen garden,

ducking under the gippo's clothespegs

catching her apron on the blackcurrant bushes,

past beanrows and onion-bed

and tomatoes ripening on the wall

towards the old man playing the harmonium in the orchard,

and sits down on the grass at his side and shells the green peas

that grow up through the lap of her frock that brushes the dew.

In Donkey Street, so furred with sleep,

Dai Bread, Polly Garter, Nogood Boyo,

before the dawn that is about to be and dream of

Harems.

Babies.

Nothing.

Time passes

Listen. Time passes.

An owl flies I home past Bethesda, to a chapel in an oak.

And the dawn inches up.

Stand on this hill. This is Llareggub Hill, old as the hills,

high, cool, and green,

and from this small circle, of stones,

made not by druids but by Mrs Beynon's Billy,

you can see all the town below you sleeping in the first of the dawn.

The principality of the sky lightens now,

over our green hill, into spring morning

larked and crowed and belling.

The Reverend Eli Jenkins, gropes out of bed

into his preacher's black, combs back his bard's white hair,

and hearing the sea break and the gab of birds,

remembers his own verses and tells them softly to empty Coronation Street

that is rising and raising its blinds.

Dear Gwalia!

I know there are Towns lovelier than ours,

And fairer hills and loftier far,

And groves more full of flowers,

And boskier woods more blithe with spring

And bright with birds' adorning,

And sweeter bards than I to sing their praise this beauteous morning.

By Cader Idris, tempest-torn, Or Moel yr Wyddfa's glory,

Carnedd Llewelyn beauty born, Plinlimmon old in story,

By mountains where King Arthur dreams,

By Penmaenmawr defiant, He looks back and spies Llareggub

Llareggub Hill a molehill seems, A pygmy to a giant.

By Sawdde, Senny, Dovey, Dee,

Edw, Eden, Aled, all, Taff and Towy

broad and free, Llyfnant with its waterfall,

Claerwen, Cleddau, Dulais, Daw, Ely,

Gwili, Ogwr, Nedd, Small is our River Dewi, Lord,

A baby on a rushy bed.

By Carreg Cennen, King of time,

Our Heron Head is only A bit of stone

with seaweed spread

Where gulls come to be lonely.

A tiny dingle is Milk Wood

By Golden Grove 'neath Grongar,

But let me choose and oh! I should

Love all my life and longer

To stroll among our trees and stray

In Goosegog Lane, on Donkey Down,

And hear the Dewi sing all day,

And never, never leave the town.

The Reverend Jenkins closes the front door.

His morning service is over.

Where you get that hair from?

Got it from a old tom cat.

Give it back then, love.

Oh there's a perm!

Where you get that nose from, Lily? - Got it from my father, silly.

You've got it on upside down! Oh there's a conk!

Look at your complexion! Oh no, you look.

Needs a bit of make-up. Needs a veil. Oh there's glamour!

Where you get that smile, Lil?

Never you mind, girl. Nobody loves you.

That's what you think. - Who is it loves you?

Shan't tell. - Come on, Lily.

Cross your heart then?

Cross my heart.

And very softly, her lips almost touching her reflection,

she breathes the name and clouds the shaving-glass.

Lily! - Yes, Mam.

Where's my tea, girl?

Where d'you think? In the cat-box?

Lily! - Coming up, Mam.

Mr Pugh, in the School House opposite,

takes up the morning tea to Mrs Pugh,

and whispers on the stairs

Here's your arsenic, dear.

And your weedkiller biscuit.

I've throttled your parakeet.

I've spat in the vases.

I've put cheese in the mouseholes. Here's your...

...nice tea, dear.

Too much sugar.

You haven't tasted it yet, dear.

Too much milk, then.

Has Mr Jenkins said his poetry?

Yes, dear.

Then it's time to get up. Give me my glasses.

No, not my reading glasses, I want to look out.

I want to see

Lily Smalls the treasure down on her red knees

washing the front step.

She's tucked her dress in her bloomers

oh, the baggage!

P.C. Attila Rees,

stamping out of Handcuff House

in a heavy beef-red huff,

black browed

under his damp helmet...

He's going to arrest Polly Garter, mark my words.

What for, dear? - For having babies.

...and lumbering down towards the strand to see that the sea is still there.

Mary Ann Sailors, opening her bedroom window above the taproom

and calling out to the heavens

I'm eighty-five years

three months

and a day!

I will say this for her,

she never makes a mistake.

Organ Morgan at his bedroom window

playing chords on the sill to the morning fishwife gulls who,

heckling over Donkey Street, observe

Me, Dai Bread,

hurrying to the bakery, pushing in my shirt-tails,

buttoning my waistcoat,

ping goes a button,

why can't they sew them.

No time for breakfast, nothing for breakfast,

there's wives for you.

Me, Mrs Dai Bread One,

capped and shawled

and no old corset,

nice to be comfy,

nice to be nice,

clogging on the cobbles to stir up a neighbour.

Me, Mrs Dai Bread Two,

gypsied to kill

in a silky scarlet petticoat

above my knees,

high-heel shoes with one heel missing,

tortoiseshell comb in my bright black slinky hair,

nothing else at all but a dab of scent,

tell your fortune in the tea-leaves,

scowling at the sunshine,

lighting up my pipe.

Me, Nogood Boyo,

up to no good in the wash-house

Me, Miss Price, in my pretty print housecoat,

deft at the clothesline, natty as a jenny-wren,

then pit-pat back to my egg in its cosy.

Me, Polly Garter, under the washing line,

giving the breast in the garden to my bonny new baby.

Nothing grows in our garden, only washing. And babies.

And where's their fathers live, my love?

Over the hills and far away.

Oh, isn't life a terrible thing,

thank God?

Now frying-pans spit,

kettles and cats purr in the kitchen.

The town smells of seaweed and breakfast

Willy Nilly postman downs his last bucket of black brackish tea

and rumbles out bandy to the clucking back

where the hens twitch and grieve for their tea-soaked sops.

Mrs Willy Nilly full of tea to her double-chinned brim

broods and bubbles over her coven of kettles

on the hissing hot range

always ready to steam open the mail.

Mr and Mrs Cherry Owen, in their Donkey Street room that is bedroom,

parlour, kitchen, and scullery,

sit down to last night's supper

See that smudge on the wall by the picture of Auntie Blossom?

That's where you threw the sago.

You only missed me by a inch.

I always miss Auntie Blossom too.

Remember last night?

In you reeled, my boy,

as drunk as a deacon with a big wet bucket and a fish-frail full of stout

and you looked at me and you said,

'God has come home!'

you said, and then over the bucket you went,

sprawling and bawling,

and the floor was all flagons and eels.

And then

you took off your trousers

and you said,

'Does anybody want a fight!'

Oh, you old baboon.

Give me a kiss.

And then you sang 'Aberystwyth'

tenor...

and bass.

I always sing 'Aberystwyth'

And then you did a little dance on the table.

I did? - Drop dead!

And then what did I do?

Then you cried like a baby

and said you were a poor drunk orphan

with nowhere to go but the grave.

And what did I do next, my dear?

Then you danced on the table all over again and said you

were King Solomon Owen and I was your

Mrs Sheba.

And then?

And then I got you into bed

and you snored all night like a brewery.

Up the street, in the Sailors Arms, Sinbad Sailors, grandson of Mary Ann Sailors,

draws a pint in the sunlit bar.

The ship's clock in the bar says half past eleven.

Half past eleven is opening time.

The hands of the clock have stayed still at half past eleven for fifty years.

It is always opening time in the Sailors Arms.

Here's to me, Sinbad.

All over the town, babies and old men are cleaned

and put into their broken prams and wheeled on to the sunlit cockled cobbles

Noses are wiped, heads picked, hair combed, paws scrubbed,

ears boxed, and the children shrilled off to school.

Nogood Boyo goes out in the dinghy Zanzibar,

ships the oars, drifts slowly in the dab-filled bay,

and, lying on his back in the unbaled water,

among crabs' legs and tangled lines,

looks up at the spring sky.

I don't know who's up there

and I don't care.

That's Willy Nilly knocking at Bay View.

Rat-a-tat, very soft.

The knocker's got a kid glove on.

Who's sent a letter to Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard?

Careful now,

she swabs the front glassy.

Every step's like a bar of soap.

Mind your size twelveses.

That old Bessie would beeswax the lawn to make the birds slip.

Morning, Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard.

Good morning, postman.

Here's a letter for you with stamped and addressed envelope enclosed,

all the way from Builth Wells.

A gentleman wants to study birds

and can he have accommodation for two weeks and a bath.

Vegetarian.

You wouldn't know he was in the house, Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard.

He'd be out in the mornings at the bang of dawn

with his bag of breadcrumbs and his little telescope...

And come home at all hours covered with feathers.

I don't want persons in my nice clean rooms breathing all over the chairs...

Cross my heart, he won't breathe.

...and putting their feet on my carpets

and sneezing on my china

and sleeping in my sheets...

He only wants a single bed, Mrs Ogmore...

Pritchard.

And back she goes to the kitchen to polish the potatoes.

One,

two,

three,

four,

five...

That's Mrs Rose Cottage.

What's today?

To-day she gets the letter from her sister in Gorslas.

How's the twins' teeth?

He's stopping at School House.

Good morning, Mrs Pugh.

Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard won't have a gentleman in from Builth Wells

because he'll sleep in her sheets,

Mrs Rose Cottage's sister in Gorslas's twins have got to have them out...

Give me the parcel.

It's for Mr Pugh, Mrs Pugh.

Never you mind. What's inside it? - A book.

A book

called Lives of the Great Poisoners.

Morning, Mr Edwards.

Very small news.

Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard won't have birds in the house,

and Mr Pugh's bought a book now on how to do in Mrs Pugh.

Have you got a letter from her?

Miss Price loves you with all her heart.

Smelling of lavender to-day.

She's down to the last of the elderflower wine but the quince jam's bearing up

and she's knitting roses on the doilies.

Last week she sold three jars of boiled sweets,

pound of humbugs, half a box of jellybabies

and six coloured photos of Llareggub.

Yours for ever.

Then twenty-one X's.

Oh, Willy Nilly, she's a ruby!

Here's my letter. Put it into her hands now.

All the women are out this morning, in the sun.

You can tell it's Spring.

There goes Mrs Cherry,

you can tell her by her trotters,

off she trots new as a daisy.

Who's that talking by the pump?

Mrs Floyd and Boyo, talking flatfish.

What can you talk about flatfish?

High heels now,

in the morning too,

Mrs Rose Cottage's eldest Mae,

seventeen and never been kissed ho ho,

going young and milking under my window to the field with the nannygoats,

she reminds me all the way.

Can't hear what the women are gabbing round the pump.

Same as ever.

Who's having a baby, who blacked whose eye,

seen Polly Garter giving her belly an airing,

who's dead, who's dying,

there's a lovely day,

oh the cost of soapflakes!

Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard

la di da

got a man in Builth Wells

and he got a little telescope to look at birds

Willy Nilly said

Remember her first husband?

He didn't need a telescope.

He looked at them undressing through the keyhole.

And he used to shout Tallyho.

But Mr Ogmore was a proper gentleman

Even though he hanged his collie.

Seen Mrs Butcher Beynon?

She said Butcher Beynon put dogs in the mincer

Go on, he's pulling her leg

Now don't you dare tell her that, there's a dear

Or she'll think he's trying to pull it off and eat it,

There's a nasty lot live here when you come to think.

Organ Morgan's at it early.

You can tell it's Spring.

And he hears the noise of milk-cans.

And how's Organ Morgan, Mrs Morgan?

You look dead beat

It's organ organ all the time with him

Up every night until midnight playing the organ.

Oh, I'm a martyr to music.

Somebody's coming.

Now the voices round the pump can see somebody coming.

Hush,

there's a hush!

You can tell by the noise of the hush,

it's Polly Garter.

Hullo, Polly my love,

can you hear the dumb goose-hiss of the wives

as they huddle and peck or flounce at a waddle away?

Who cuddled you when?

Which of their gandering hubbies moaned in Milk Wood

for your naughty mothering arms

and body like a wardrobe, love?

Too late, cock,

too late.

For the town's half over with its morning.

The morning's busy as bees.

There's the clip clop of horses

on the sunhoneyed cobbles of the humming streets,

hammering of horse- shoes, gobble quack and cackle,

tomtit twitter from the bird-ounced boughs,

braying on Donkey Down.

Crow caw,

pigeon coo, clock strike, bull bellow,

and the ragged gabble of the beargarden school

as the women scratch and babble in Mrs Organ Morgan's general shop

where everything is sold: custard, buckets,

henna, rat-traps, shrimp-nets, sugar,

stamps, confetti, paraffin, hatchets, whistles.

Evans the Death presses hard with black gloves

on the coffin of his breast

in case his heart jumps out,

Outside, the sun springs down on the rough and tumbling town.

It runs through the hedges of Goosegog Lane,

cuffing the birds to sing.

Spring whips green down Cockle Row,

and the shells ring out.

Llareggub this snip of a morning is wildfruit and warm,

the streets, fields, sands and waters

springing in the young sun.

Spring stirs Gossamer Beynon

schoolmistress like spoon.

No, I'll take the mulatto,

by God, who's captain here?

Parlez-vous jig jig, Madam?

It is Spring in Llareggub

in the sun in my old age,

and this is the Chosen Land.

and this is the Chosen Land.

And in Willy Nilly the Postman's dark and sizzling damp tea-coated

misty pygmy kitchen where the spittingcat kettles throb and hop on the range,

Mrs Willy Nilly steams open

Mr Mog Edwards' letter to Miss Myfanwy Price

and reads it aloud to Willy Nilly by the squint of the Spring sun

through the one sealed window running with tears,

while the drugged, bedraggled hens

at the back door whimper and snivel

for the lickerish bog-black tea.

From Manchester House, Llareggub.

Sole Prop: Mr Mog Edwards (late of Twll),

Linendraper,

Haberdasher,

Master Tailor,

Costumier.

Beloved Myfanwy Price

my Bride in Heaven,

I love you until Death do us part

and then we shall be together for ever and ever.

A new parcel of ribbons has come from Carmarthen to-day,

all the colours in the rainbow.

I wish I could tie a ribbon in your hair

a white one but it cannot be.

Polly Garter bought two garters with roses

but she never got stockings

so what is the use I say.

Mr Waldo tried to sell me a woman's nightie outsize

he said he found it

and we know where.

If this goes on I shall be in the workhouse.

My heart is in your bosom

and yours is in mine.

God be with you always Myfanwy Price

and keep you lovely for me in His Heavenly Mansion.

I must stop now and remain,

Your Eternal, Mog Edwards.

And then a little message with a rubber stamp.

Shop at Mog's!

And Willy Nilly, rumbling, jockeys out again

Herring gulls heckling down to the harbour

where the fishermen spit and prop the morning up

and eye the fishy sea smooth

to the sea's end as it lulls in blue.

But with blue lazy eyes the fishermen gaze

at that milkmaid whispering water

with no nick or ripple

as though it blew great guns and serpents

and typhooned the town.

From one of the finger-bowls a primrose grows.

Cross my palm with silver.

Out of our housekeeping money.

What d'you see, lovie?

I see a featherbed. With three pillows on it.

And a text above the bed.

I can't read what it says, there's great clouds blowing.

Now they have blown away.

God is Love, the text says.

That's our bed.

And now it's vanished.

The sun's spinning like a top. Who's this coming out of the sun?

It's a hairy little man with big pink lips. He got a wall eye.

It's Dai, it's Dai Bread!

Ssh! The featherbed's floating back.

The little man's taking his boots off. He's climbing into bed.

Go on, go on.

There's two women in bed.

He looks at them both, with his head cocked on one side.

He's whistling through his teeth.

Now he grips his little arms round one of the women.

Which one, which one?

I can't see any more.

There's great clouds blowing again.

Ach, the mean old clouds!

I loved a man

whose name was Tom

He was strong as a bear

and two yards long

I loved a man

whose name was Dick

He was big as a barrel

and three feet thick

And I loved a man

whose name was Harry

Six feet tall

and sweet as a cherry

But the one I loved best

awake or asleep

Was little Willy Wee

and he's six feet deep.

Praise the Lord!

We are a musical nation.

Oh, Mr Waldo,

I dote on that Gossamer Beynon.

She's a lady

all over.

No lady that I know is

And if only grandma'd die,

cross my heart I'd go down on my knees Mr Waldo

and I'd say

Miss Gossamer

I'd say

Gossamer Beynon high-heels out of school

The sun hums down through the cotton flowers

of her dress into the bell of her heart

and buzzes in the honey there and couches and kisses,

lazy-loving and boozed, in her red-berried breast.

Eyes run from the trees and windows of the street,

steaming 'Gossamer,'

and strip her to the nipples and the bees.

She blazes naked past the Sailors Arms,

the only woman on the Dai-Adamed earth.

Sinbad Sailors places on her thighs

still dewdamp from the first mangrowing cockcrow garden

his reverent goat-bearded hands.

I don't care if he is common,

she whispers to her salad-day deep self,

I want to gobble him up.

I don't care if he does drop his aitches,

she tells the stripped and mother-of-the-world big-beamed and Eve-hipped spring of her self,

so long as he's all cucumber and hooves.

Oh, beautiful

beautiful Gossamer B,

I wish I wish that you were for me.

I wish you were not so

educated.

She feels his goatbeard tickle her in the middle of the world

like a tuft of wiry fire,

and she turns in a terror of delight

away from his whips and whiskery conflagration,

and sits down in the kitchen to a plate heaped high.

Persons with manners do not read at table,

Some persons were brought up in pigsties.

Pigs don't read at table, dear.

Pigs can't read, my dear.

I know one who can.

Alone in the hissing laboratory of his wishes,

Mr Pugh minces among bad vats and jeroboams,

tiptoes through spinneys of murdering herbs,

agony dancing in his crucibles,

and mixes especially for Mrs Pugh

a venomous porridge unknown to toxicologists

which will scald and viper through her

until her ears fall off like figs

her toes grow big and black as balloons,

and steam comes screaming out of her navel.

You know best, dear,

What's that book by your trough, Mr Pugh?

It's a theological work, my dear.

Lives of the Great

Saints.

I saw you talking to a saint this morning.

Saint Polly Garter.

She was martyred again last night.

Mrs Organ Morgan saw her with Mr Waldo.

But you don't go nesting in long combinations, I said to myself,

like Mr Waldo was wearing,

and your dress nearly over your head

like Polly Garter's.

Oh, they didn't fool me.

It isn't the right kind of hobby at all for a woman that can't say No

even to midgets. Remember Bob Spit?

He wasn't any bigger than a baby

and he gave her two.

But they're two nice boys,

I will say that,

Fred Spit and Arthur.

Sometimes

I like Fred best

and sometimes

I like Arthur.

Who do you like best, Organ?

Oh, Bach

without any doubt.

Bach every time for me.

Organ Morgan, you haven't been listening to a word I said.

It's organ, organ

all the time with you.

And then

Palestrina

Captain Cat, at his window thrown wide to the sun

and the clippered seas he sailed long ago when his eyes were blue and bright,

slumbers and voyages; ear-ringed and rolling,

I Love You Rosie Probert tattooed on his belly,

he brawls with broken bottles

in the fug and babel of the dark dock bars,

roves with a herd of short and good time cows in every naughty port and twines and souses

with the drowned and blowzy-breasted dead.

He weeps as he sleeps and sails.

One voice of all he remembers most dearly

as his dream buckets down.

Lazy early Rosie with the flaxen thatch,

whom he shared with Tom-Fred the donkeyman and many another seaman,

clearly and near to him speaks from the bedroom of her dust.

In that gulf and haven, fleets by the dozen have anchored

for the little heaven of the night;

but she speaks to Captain napping Cat alone.

Mrs Probert...

from Duck Lane, Jack.

Quack twice

and ask for Rosie

What seas did you see,

Tom Cat, Tom Cat,

In your sailoring days long long ago?

What sea beasts were

In the wavery green

When you were my master?

I'll tell you the truth.

Seas barking like seals,

Blue seas and green, Seas covered with eels

And mermen and whales.

Knock twice, Jack,

At the door of my grave

And ask for Rosie.

Remember her.

She is forgetting.

The earth which filled her mouth Is vanishing from her.

Remember me.

I have forgotten you.

I am going into the darkness

of the darkness for ever.

I have forgotten that I was ever born.

Up the silences and echoes of the passages of the eternal night.

and then she forgets him too.

Boyo catches a whalebone corset.

It is all he has caught all day.

She's wearing her nightgown.

Would you like this nice wet corset, Mrs Dai Bread Two?

No, I won't!

And a bite of my little apple?

He offers with no hope.

I want to be good Boyo,

but nobody'll let me.

He sighs as she writhes politely.

The land fades, the sea flocks silently away;

and through the warm white cloud where he lies, silky, tingling,

uneasy Eastern music undoes him in a Japanese minute.

Now the town is dusk.

Each cobble, donkey, goose and gooseberry street

is a thoroughfare of dusk;

and dusk and ceremonial dust,

and night's first darkening snow, and the sleep of birds, drift under

and through the live dusk of this place of love.

Llareggub is the capital of dusk.

Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, 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.

Mr Ogmore!

Mr Pritchard!

It is time to inhale your balsam.

Oh, Mrs Ogmore!

Oh, Mrs Pritchard!

Soon it will be time to get up.

Tell me your tasks,

in order.

I must put my pyjamas in the drawer marked pyjamas.

I must take my cold bath which is good for me.

I must wear my flannel band to ward off sciatica.

I must dress behind the curtain and put on my apron.

I must blow my nose.

In the garden, if you please.

In a piece of tissue-paper which I afterwards burn.

I must take my salts which are nature's friend.

I must boil the drinking water because of germs.

I must make my herb tea which is free from tannin.

And have a charcoal biscuit which is good for me.

I may smoke one pipe of asthma mixture.

In the woodshed, if you please.

And dust the parlour and spray the canary.

I must put on rubber gloves and search the peke for fleas.

I must dust the blinds and then I must raise them.

And before you let the sun in,

mind it wipes its shoes.

I'm fast.

I'm a bad lot.

God will strike me dead.

I'll go to hell, You just wait.

I'll sin till I blow up!

Down in the dusking town, Mae Rose Cottage, still lying in clover,

listens to the nannygoats chew,

draws circles of lipstick round her nipples.

Every morning when I wake, Dear Lord,

a little prayer I make,

O please to keep Thy lovely eye

On all poor creatures born to die

And every evening at sun-down I ask a blessing on the town,

For whether we last the night or no

I'm sure is always touch-and-go.

We are not wholly bad or good

Who live our lives under Milk Wood,

And Thou, I know, wilt be the first

To see our best side,

not our worst.

O let us see another day!

Bless us all this night, I pray,

And to the sun we all will bow

And say,

good-bye

but just for now!

And Lily Smalls is up to Nogood Boyo in the wash-house.

And Cherry Owen, sober as Sunday as he is every day of the week,

goes off happy as Saturday to get drunk as a deacon

as he does every night.

I always say she's got two husbands,

one drunk and one sober.

And aren't I a lucky woman?

Because I love them both.

Evening, Cherry. - Evening, Sinbad.

What'll you have? - Too much.

The Sailors Arms is always open...

Sinbad suffers to himself, heartbroken,

...oh, Gossamer,

open yours!

Dusk is drowned for ever until to-morrow,

It is all at once night now,

The windy town is a hill of windows,

and from the larrupped waves the lights of the lamps in the windows

call back the day and the dead that have run away to sea.

All over the calling dark,

babies and old men are bribed and lullabied to sleep.

Or their daughters cover up the old unwinking men like parrots,

and in their little dark in the lit and bustling young kitchen corners,

all night long they watch, beady-eyed, the long night through

in case death catches them asleep.

Unmarried girls, alone in their privately bridal bedrooms,

powder and curl for the Dance of the World.

Llareggub Hill,

that mystic tumulus,

the memorial of peoples that dwelt in the region of Llareggub

before the Celts left the Land of Summer

and where the old wizards made themselves

a wife

out of flowers.

In Pembroke City when I was young

I lived by the Castle Keep

Sixpence a week was my wages

For working for the chimbley-sweep.

Come and sweep my chimbley

Come and sweep my chimbley

Come and sweep my chimbley

Bring along your chimbley brush!

Six cold pennies he gave me

Not a farthing more or less

And all the fare I could afford

Was parsnip gin and watercress.

Come and sweep my chimbley

Come and sweep my chimbley

Come and sweep my chimbley

Bring along your chimbley brush!

Remember me Captain?

Do you see me, Captain? The white bone talking?

Died of blisters.

Blind Captain Cat

Like a cat, he sees in the dark.

Through the voyages of his tears he sails to see the dead.

Dancing Williams!

Still dancing.

Jonah Jarvis

Still.

Curly Bevan's skull.

Rosie, with God.

She has forgotten dying.

Mr Mog Edwards and Miss Myfanwy Price

happily apart from anotherone

at the top and the sea end of the town

write their everynight letters of love and desire.

In the warm White Book of Llareggub

you will find the little maps of the islands of their contentment.

Oh, my Mog,

I am yours for ever.

And she looks around with pleasure at her own neat never-dull room

which Mr Mog Edwards will never enter.

Come to my arms, Myfanwy.

And Mr Waldo drunk in the dusky wood

hugs his lovely Polly Garter

under the eyes and rattling tongues of the neighbours and the birds,

and he does not care.

He smacks his live red lips.

But it is not his name that Polly Garter whispers

as she lies under the oak and loves him back.

Six feet deep that name sings in the cold earth.

But I always think

as we tumble into bed

Of little Willy Wee

who is dead,

dead,

dead.

The thin night darkens.

A breeze from the creased water sighs the streets close

under Milk waking Wood.

The Wood, whose every tree-foot's cloven

in the black glad sight of the hunters of lovers,

that is a God-built garden to Mary Ann Sailors

who knows there is Heaven on earth

and the chosen people of His kind

fire in Llareggub's land,

that is the fairday farmhands'

wantoning ignorant chapel of bridesbeds,

and, to the Reverend Eli Jenkins,

a greenleaved sermon on the innocence of men,

the suddenly wind-shaken wood

springs awake

for the second dark time

this one Spring day.