Question

story on books remove darkness

Answer 1

The 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." Say it softly, and slowly, in your head. The kind of total darkness that enfolds the Welsh seaside town of "Llareggub" at the opening of Dylan Thomas's wonderful mid-century "play for voices", which interweaves the thoughts and words of upwards of 60 characters over one day, is lost to the modern world. But it is also the incantatory darkness of dreams and visions, death and memory, as an observing consciousness creeps into the "blinded bedrooms" of the town's inhabitants, hushing and inviting us on: "Come now, drift up the dark, come up the drifting sea-dark street now in the dark night seesawing like the sea ... "

Blind Captain Cat is dreaming of long-ago sea voyages and long-dead lovers; twice-widowed Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard of her henpecked husbands; Organ Morgan of musical extravaganzas; Polly Garter of babies; Mary Ann Sailors of the Garden of Eden; Dai Bread of "Turkish girls. Horizontal." Thomas's poems - obsessed, as he put it, with "deaths and entrances" - are always pitching darkness against light, and here he seems to take particular pleasure in showing us, behind the eyes of the sleepers, "rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and the big seas of their dreams".

The sun comes up - but a radio play, of course, takes place entirely in the dark. Anything can happen, and does; the ordinary becomes fantastical and the bizarre is folded into everyday routine. Thomas stretches out his sentences into great, rolling, relentless waves, or crushes words together into compound coinages as the voices whisper and declaim: the play is bawdy, tragic, lyrical, sly, odd, familiar, broad and deep by turns. Favourite lines are a very personal affair, but members of my family are liable to declaim "I must have a charcoal biscuit, which is good for me", "Nothing grows in our garden, only washing", "Here's your arsenic, dear," or "Oh, isn't life a terrible thing, thank God?" at the least excuse (and we're not even Welsh).

As night falls again, the memories and voices of the dead press ever more closely in on the living. "Remember me. / I have forgotten you. / I am going into the darkness of the darkness for ever," intones Rosie Probert to Captain Cat. But the "silences and echoes of the passages of the eternal night", from whence these voices come, are also where we rest, sleep and dream, and where the dead can return to us - where death, as Thomas puts it elsewhere, can "have no dominion". There is a great calm benevolence about the cradling darkness in Under Milk Wood: it is communal and comforting; a welcome respite as well as a realm of fancy. (Note the choice of adjective in Thomas's defiant poem "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night".) And it is best experienced through the intimate intensity of one sense alone: