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“You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing,” the First Voice intones. “Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colors and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams.” With its brilliant, alliterative rush of vowels and consonants—rolling like the sea that provides the town its livelihood and sometimes claims the lives of its men—Under Milk Wood is a celebration of the sound of the spoken word and a paean to the power of the imagination.
The piece had its official premiere on January 25, 1954, in a BBC broadcast that starred Thomas’s fellow Welshman Richard Burton. But its first public reading took place in May 1953—just a few months before Thomas drank himself to death—at New York’s 92nd Street YMHA. Thomas himself played the First Voice. (A recording of the event is available as part of a boxed set of Thomas reading his own work; portions are also featured on a CD included in a hardback edition of Thomas’s poems.)
