by Dylan Thomas
p. 4 Bethesda: The names of chapels in Wales have come predominantly from place-names of the Holy Land in the Bible.
p. 4 S.S. Kidwelly: 'S.S.' stands for screw steamer or steamship. Kidwelly (an Anglicisation of the Welsh Cydweli) is an ancient Carmarthenshire seaside town, across the Towy estuary from Laugharne.
p. 4 Davy dark: A reference to the sea as 'Davy Jones's [Jonah's] locker', after a sailing name for the supposed evil spirit of the sea. But in the phrase there is also a coal mining association with the miners' safety-lamp invented by Sir Humphrey Davy (1778-1829), used in the mines from 1816 onwards. Cf. Thomas's poem 'I see the boys of summer': 'From the fair dead who flush the sea / The bright-eyed worm on Davy's lamp.'
p. 4 the long drowned: Despite its maritime context, the passage in which the drowned sailors speak guiltily but longingly about their former lives shows the influence of Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology and of a poem such as 'Voices from things Growing in a Churchyard' by Thomas's favorite modern poet, Thomas Hardy.
What may also have left its mark is the legend of the church and cemetery drowned by the sea in Llanina Bay, below the bungalow in New Quay that was the poet's home in 1944-45. In the 1949 broadcast 'Living in Wales', Thomas described himself as one who, 'hoofed with seaweed, did a jig on the Llanina sands.' The broadcast lists the memories that Thomas felt kept him in touch with Wales when away from home, a list that anticipates the remembered details (some vivid others fading) that here keep the drowned mariners in touch with life: 'settles in the corners, hams on the hooks, hymns after stop-tap, tenors with leeks, the hwyl at Ebenezer, the cockles on the stalls, dressers, eisteddfodau, Welshcakes, slag heaps, funerals, and bethel-bells. What was harder to remember was what birds sounded like and said in Gower; what sort of a sound and a shape was Carmarthen Bay; how did the morning come in through the windows of Solva; what silence when night fell in the Aeron Valley' (Broadcasts, 204-5).
p. 5 Nantucket: An island (and town) in the Atlantic, just south of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Its Indian name means 'far away land', and its whaling associations evoke Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, in which Captain Ahab, too, 'lost his step', in losing his leg to the whale.
p. 5 Tom-Fred the donkeyman: Given the relative fewness of surnames in small communities in Wales, it became useful to identify individuals by the addition of a parent's Christian name (hence Tom-Fred), the person's job (hence donkeyman), the name of the home (Mae Rose-Cottage), or of the work-place (Mary Ann the Sailors). Several such names of people Thomas knew at New Quay, including a Dai Fred and a Mrs Evans the Lion, are mentioned by him in the letter quoted in the Introduction (p. xvii).
The term 'donkeyman' is probably not a reference to the animal, but to the 'donkey-engine', a small auxiliary engine for hauling or hoisting freight on board ship, or for pumping water into the boilers of a steamship.
p. 5 sealawyer, born in Mumbles: A 'sealawyer' was an argumentative sailor always aware of his own rights, the army equivalent being a barrack-room lawyer. Mumbles is a village on the West shore of Swansea Bay, in effect a suburb of Thomas's birthplace, Swansea.
p. 6 lavabread: A reflection of the Swansea pronunciation of 'laver-bread' (see textual note): a dish of edibal laver seaweed, traditionally associated with the area.
p. 6 Maesgwyn: 'Maesgwyn' (literally 'Fair Meadow') is a common Welsh name for a farm. But Thomas also had childhood memories of a farm called Maesgwyn some two miles from Fernhill, his maternal aunt's farm at Llangain, celebrated in the poem 'Fern HIll'.
p. 7 Samson-syrup-gold-maned: Samson's mane occurs in the biblical story of Samson, which of course also includes a lion (Judges V, 5-9). However, the reference in this rather Joycean piece of word-play is also to the lion trade-mark for Tate and Lyle's famous 'Golden Syrup', which incorporates the sentence 'Out of the strong came forth sweetness' from the Samson story. Myfanwy Price is a 'sweetshop-keeper', and the same conjunction of ideas is picked up again on p. 29: 'MR EDWARDS [whispers]/I love Miss Price./ Syrup is sold in the post-office'.
p. 7 Cloth Hall … Emporium: Like the name of Mog Edwards's actual shop, Manchester House (pp. 29, 37), Cloth Hall and Emporium were typical names for drapery establishments. A Manchester House, for example, existed in both Laugharne and New Quay, the villages that influenced Under Milk Wood. But the satiric effect of the names also owes something to Thomas's reading of Caradoc Evans's novel Nothing to Pay (1930) which has the Manchester House and a Cloth Hall, as well as a catalogue of drapery wares ('flannelette' and 'calico' etc) like the one Mog Edwards recites here.
p. 7 where the change hums on wires: In some large town shops (hence Mog Edwards's ambition), well beyond the Second World War, payment and change for purchased goods were sped between shop-attendant and cashier along a system of sprung pulleys and wires. Thomas would have remembered the device from the Ben Evans department store in Castle Bailey Street in Swansea, destroyed by German bombs in 1941.
p. 7 yes, yes yes…: Evoking Molly Bloom's final, repeated 'yes' in her soliloquy at the end of James Joyce's Ulysses.
p. 8 Jack Black the Cobbler: Under Milk Wood is not a roman a clef in any strict sense. But Thomas sometimes linked name and occupation from actual memory. The following recollection by one of Thomas's very earliest schoolmates can serve as an example. It suggests that Jack Black as the name of the cobbler came from one particularly colorful memory: 'In the Uplands was a group of small shops, amongst them Mr. Grey, the newsagent, Mr Black the cobbler, and White's, the shoe shop. One day, whilst a group of us waited for the school door to be opened, Dylan told us importantly that no-one was allowed to open a shop there unless their name was a color. We all believed him, especially as, by a strange coincidence, the next shop to open was Mr Green the Greengrocer' (Joan A Hardy, 'At "Dame" School with Dylan', The New Welsh Review, Spring 1995, p. 39).
p. 8 gooseberried double bed of the wood: Apart from the tale that babies are found under gooseberry bushes, to 'play gooseberry' was to act as a chaperon, or to be an unwanted third presence when lovers wanted to be alone. For that sense of intrusion and exclusion, cf. 'I was alone on the gooseberry earth' in 'The Crumbs of One Man's Year' (Broadcasts, 154) and 'I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood' in the poem 'Lament'.
p. 8 tosspots in the spit-and-sawdust: The habitual boozers in the cheap bars of public houses, where the only floor-covering was sawdust.
p. 8 sixpenny hops: Cheap village-hall dances.
p. 8 Ach y fi!: A Welsh term of disgusted disapprobation. Among the papers now at Texas, there is a note in which Thomas reminded himself to secure the correct spelling for certain Welsh words and expressions, including 'Ach y fi!'
p. 8 making Welshcakes in the snow: The play is of course interested in the surrealism of dreams. For example, Gossamer Beynon, 'dreaming deep … finds, with no surprise, a small rough ready man with a bushy tail winking in a paper carrier' (p. 14). But apart from its surrealism, the idea of 'making Welshcakes in the snow' is probably also an allusion to an old rural custom in Wales of using in the preparation of cakes and pastries, for reasons of softness and coldness as well as for other more practical reasons, water derived from melted snow. 'Welshcakes' are traditional Welsh griddle-cakes.
In an earlier version in the worksheets now at Texas the Welshcakes were originally 'fish-cakes' (then changed to 'Welshcakes'), and the dream was indoors:Evans the Death, the undertaker, laughs high and aloud in his sleep and curls up his toes. He knows that his mother is suddenly alive, in the kitchen, making Welshcakes, after 25 years, and he is going to climb downstairs in his little shirt and steal a fistful of currants to take up to bed and eat under the bedclothes.
p. 10 using language: Using bad language. Cf. 'chalking words' (p. 11), meaning chalking naughty words.
p. 10 Singing in the w.: Singing in the w.c. (water closet or lavatory).
p. 11 Playing moochins: Thomas is combining the idea of 'playing dirty' (suggesting the Welsh word mochyn meaning pig) and 'playing truant' (for which a co
mmon Anglo-Welsh dialect word in West Wales is 'mitching'), while also suggesting to the eye the English idiom 'mooching' (loitering).
On a worksheet now at Texas, among the 'Welsh spellings wanted' Thomas included 'mwchins'. 'Moochins' turned out to be his own last choice (see Textual Notes, p. 86). In as much as it evokes the Welsh word for pig (mochyn — real plural moch), 'moochins' is illegitimately pluralised by the simple addition of an English 's'. The same thing happens in the poem 'Prologue' when the plural of bryn (meaning hill; real plural bryniau) becomes 'bryns' (cf. 'parches', p. 17 and Note). In this way, the play reflects certain characteristics of Anglo-Welsh speech in those Anglicised areas of Wales where the Welsh language is still strong or only a generation away.
p. 11 b.t.m.: That is, bottom. But the euphemistic abbreviation also plays on the name of the woman with whom Mr Waldo has been 'carrying on' — Beattie Morris.
p. 15 Salt Lake Farm: There is actually a Salt House Farm on Sir John's Hill in Laugharne. Changing it to 'Salt Lake' was what gave Thomas the name 'Utah' Watkins for the farmer — after Utah, the American state of which Salt Lake City, centre of the Mormon faith, is the capital. In the worksheet now at Texas, 'Utah Watkins' was originally 'Mormon Watkins'.
p. 16 Call me Dolores/Like they do in the stories: In the New English Weekly in November 1938 Thomas had reviewed H. G. Wells's novel Apropos of Dolores — the story, according to Thomas, of 'a superlatively common woman' (Early Prose Writings, ed. Walford Davies, Dent 1971, p. 191).
p. 16 Mr Beynon, in butcher's bloodied apron, springheels …: In a popular Victorian melodrama, Springheeled Jack, the title character, reputedly based on an historical person, was a butcher given to converting people into pie meat. He was exposed when a pie was one day found to have a human finger in it. (We are grateful to Mr Terry Phillips for pointing out this source.)
p. 17 Eisteddfodau: Welsh-language competitive literary and cultural festival. An 'esiteddfod' was originally a session or assembly of poets, the institution's name deriving from 'eistedd', meaning 'to sit'. The main modern event, the annual Royal National Eisteddfod of Wales, crowns a pattern of small regional and local festivals.
p. 17 He intricately rhymes, to the music of crwth and pibgorn: A 'crwth' (or crowd) was a musical instrument of the lyre family, but played with a bow. It was the only instrument of the lyre family, but played with a bow. It was the only instrument recognized alongside the harp by the Welsh minstrelsy in the period of the Poets of the Gentry from the late thirteenth century onwards in Wales. It remained in vogue into the eighteenth century, when it was supplanted by the fiddle. A 'pibgorn' means literally a 'horn pipe'. Though it did not enjoy the same vogue as the 'crwth' or harp in accompanying traditional, sung Welsh poetry, the 'pibgorn' also lasted well into the eighteenth century.
The significance of the reference to the two instruments in relation to Eli Jenkins is that it portrays him as a poet capable of using the traditional strict metros of the medieval Welsh poets (hence 'He intricately rhymes …') as well as the less strict verses of the two poems that represent him here. Of those two, the morning poem does suggest the effects of traditional metrical intricacy, but in reality both are poems done deliberately in the manner of local newspaper verse.
p. 17 parchs: 'Parch' (here illegitimately pluralised by the addition of an 's') is an abbreviation and nominalisation of the Welsh adjective 'parchedig' (meaning reverend as a religious title).
The worksheets now at Texas show Thomas clustering specific Welsh items such as 'parchs', 'pisteddfodau', 'crwth and pibgorn' for use in relation to Eli Jenkins at this stage. Two interesting items listed, but not used, were 'penillion' (literally 'verses', but specifically verses for both accompanied and unaccompanied singing) and 'Siol Jemima' (Jemima's shawl). The latter refers to Jemima Nicholas (d. 1832) who helped defeat the French expeditionary force that landed at STrumble Head near Fishguard in 1797 by leading onto a hill a crowd of local women whose red shawls and tall hats made the Frenchmen mistake them for armed soldiers. Another idea on the same worksheet — 'Like the old wizards who made a wife out of flowers' — was employed towards the end of the play (see penultimate note below).
p. 18 under the gippo's clothespegs: 'Gippo' (gypsy) has to be understood in relation to 'clothespegs': bell beyond the Second World War, the main objects for sale by the Romanie or gypsies traveling throughout South Wales were wooden pegs for hanging laundry on a clothesline.
p. 18 the old man playing the harmonium in the orchard: In a worksheet now at Texas, this visionary picture had more pagan overtones:A very old God touches Mary Ann Sailors and she answers in a tongue she does not understand. She goes down those garden paths with a watering can and the old God plays his harmonium in the orchard.
p. 18 Mrs Beynon's Billy: A note among the papers now at Texas shows that Thomas had thought of developing this character further:A new small character. Mrs Beynon's Billy, who is always faking up signs of antiquity in caves and on hills. Flints and arrow. Cave paintings. Skulls. At the end, he finds a real skull and comes screaming home.
p. 19 The principality of the sky: Thomas would have been keen to bring in the word 'principality' somewhere, given its role as a word often used for Wales itself. In a note inside the back of the folder holding MS (see Textual Notes), two contending names for the street that became Coronation Street were Principality Street and Dragon Street.
p. 20 Dear Gwalia!: 'Gwalia', as a name for Wales as a whole, has an old-fashioned flavor that suits the character of the Reverend Eli Jenkins. Of late medieval origin, it enjoyed a remarkable sentimental revival in Victorian times, in both Welsh and English. Several nineteenth-century patriotic poems opened with an address to 'Dear Gwalia' — including, as it happens, the Welsh poem 'Can Mewn Cystudd' ('A Song in Affliction') by Dylan Thomas's famous great-uncle William Thomas (1834-79), the Unitarian preacher, poet and Radical leader. It was from that relative's bardic name, Gwilym Marles, that Thomas derived his own middle name of Marlais, and the poet-preacher's poetic taste and populist-Unitarian persuasion may in turn have made him a vague model for Eli Jenkins himself.
Details of the Welsh mountains contrasted with Llareggub Hill are as follows: Cader Idris (Merionethshire; literally Idris's Chair [denoting a Camp], Idris being usually associated with a giant); Moel y Wyddfa (Caernarfonshire; more often Moel yr Wyddfa, literally Peak of Snowdon; the highest mountain in Wales and England); Carnedd Llewelyn (literally The Burial Cairn of Ll[y]welyn; the second highest peak in the Snowdon range); Plinlimmon (Mid Wales; an Anglicisation of Pumlumon, literally five beacons); Penmaen Mawr (Caernarfonshire, a promontory on the north coast; literally Head of Large Stone).
Carreg Cennen is a thirteenth-century castle about the Towy Valley in Carmarthenshire, 'King of time' because of its dramatic natural defenses in the form of precipitous limestone cliffs.
Golden Grove is the name of a small village, and its surrounding area, in the Towy Valley, the location also of Grongar (literally Round Fortress) celebrated in John Dyer's famous pastoral poem 'Grongar Hill' (1726).
Of the eighteen rivers contrasted with the village's River Dewi, only Daw is not immediately recognizable as the name of a Welsh river. It is probably the River Ddawan (the Thaw of Aberthaw) in Glamorganshire, celebrated by Iolo Morganwg in his 'Banks of the Daw' (Poems Lyrical and Pastoral, 1794). Daw has also another function here. It comes at a point where Eli Jenkins's verses use an effect called 'cymeriad', characteristic of some traditional Welsh poetry, whereby words are sometimes grouped by alphabetical sequence: hence 'Claerwen, Cleddau, Dulas, Daw, /Ely, Gwili …' Thomas's relishing of the musical effect of this traditional close patterning of consonants is clear in his rendering of Eli Jenkins's part in the original New York recording (Caedmon Records TC2005).
The equivalent of Llareggub's River Dewi in Laugharne itself is the River Corran, a narrow stream winding through the village; but it should be noted that Dewi is also the actual name of a nearby tributary of the Taf.
Though 'Taff ' is simply the Anglicized form of 'Taf', it is normally used to refer to the industrial river of that name in South East Wales. It would be odd if Thomas meant that river rather than the equally alliterative 'Taf' whose estuary lay outside his window in Laugharne, and which merged with the Towy in the larger vista of Carmarthen Bay on which he looked out daily. These two local, converging rivers seem likelier subjects for the line itself — 'Taff and Towy broad and free …' It is interesting, therefore, that it is as the Carmarthenshire 'Taf' (with a soft 'f') that Thomas can very clearly be heard pronouncing it in his reading of Eli Jenkins's part in the recording of the May 1953 premiere stage-reading in New York (Caedmon Records TC2005). Thomas probably thought that even the pronunciation 'Taf' (soft 'f') was spelt 'Taff'.
Eli Jenkins's recital of picturesque and dramatic place-names is in a long literary tradition, but similar listings in Edward Thomas's Wales (1905) seem particularly relevant, especially in their coincidence with so many of the revers named by Eli Jenkins. About such name-lists, Edward Thomas says, 'Let me ease my memory and pamper my eyes, and possibly make a reader's brain reverberate with the sound of them' (1924 edition, pp. 15-16).
p. 24 big-besomed: A 'besom' is a broom. Apart from the play on big-bosomed, the 'besom' figures in several English idioms having to do with dominant or shrewish wives — e.g. 'to hang out the besom', meaning to take advantage of freedom during a wife's absence.
p. 29 Nogood Boyo goes out in the dinghy Zanzibar: An earlier version among the Texas manuscripts points up the superiority of the piece as we now have it: I'm losing my grip, fast. The still fish flick about. He lets one foot lazy over the Zanzibar rim, and 'crunch' says the final salmon of the sea in a North Welsh voice. Foreigners have salmoned me, he says, looking at the full Swansea-seeing sea.
p. 33 Hush, there's a hush!: For the lull in the gossip as Polly Gartr goes by, cf. Marie Trevelyan, Folk Lore and Folk Stories of Wales (1909), p. 211: 'When several people talking together suddenly become silent, they said "A with is passing". Another expression was, "Silence in the pig-market — a witch goes by"'.
