Sometimes I read to learn things because I am curious. Sometimes because the pattern of the book – the mystery, the science fiction, the fantasy, the true crime – satisfies some kind of pattern, some kind of dance in the inner circuits of my brain, a connection amongst the synapses.

Sometimes I read for the pure pleasure of listening to the music of the words.

I find it impossible to read Under Milk Wood silently. I tried, last night, and found myself quietly reciting the words aloud, just under my breath. Usually a short book like this, I’d knock off in an hour or two but – oh! – this one, I had to dog-ear the page at 34 to finish later because I was reading so much more slowly and it was so late that the words on the page were blending into stories in my dreams.¹

Thomas writes beautifully. To be a poet is to be a perfectionist. To get each word just right. I was watching Poetry in America this weekend², and they were analyzing Robert Lowell’s July in Washington. They showed how he reworked it, and reworked it, and reworked it again, changing words, changing topics, changing seasons, changing lines, changing images, until he got it just right. And that, I think, for the poet is the definition of success. Not glory or fame or money – but the satisfaction of having the words just right. Having them lay on the page in perfect order, spilling from top to bottom (or stacking from left to right) with a sudden click of relief, as when a dislocated bone snaps back into place, or the coming together of a just out-of-reach snap, or the satisfaction of the clumsy earring-back finally slipping onto the post.

Under Milk Wood proves those who think of poetry as a serious thing wrong. With love, Thomas speaks of each character, asleep in their beds: Mrs. Organ-Pritchard wedged between the ghosts of her two, dead, hen-pecked husbands, rehearsing them – even asleep, even dead – in the rituals they must complete to satisfy her obsessive-compulsive cleaning, right down to reminding the sun to wipe its feet before streaming in through the windows, as if it were a son with muddy shoes, not a sun. And another hen-pecked husband – alive this time – Mr. Pugh, dreams of putting ground-glass in his wife’s omelet, and, while murmuring, “I beg your pardon my dear” sneaks into the black workshop of his mind to conjure up a poison that will stop her needle-sharp tongue.

I think my favorite, however, is the lost love of the two merchants, Miss Myfanwy Price and Mr. Mog Edwards, from opposite ends of the town. She, a dressmaker and sweetshop keeper, he a draper “mad with love”. At night, they dream of each other, of casting themselves into glorious love, and “all the bells of the tills of town shall ring for our wedding.” And yet, though they write secret love letters to each other each evening before bed – protestations that perhaps they never post – the story ends with them forever apart: she in her “own, neat, neverdull room that Mr. Mog Edwards will never enter” and he hugging “his lovely money to his own heart.”

I had the chance to participate in an informal reading of Under Milk Wood once. It was casual, just something a friend put together, but getting the reading of my few lines just right was glorious. They say there’s a movie of Under Milk Wood, put together with Peter O’Toole, Elizabeth Taylor, and Richard Burton, which I have to say, sounds horrible, full of bluster and excess, and storm and violet-blue eye shadow – with all the vomitus Hollywood over-improvements of Jim Carrey set loose on Dr. Seuss – but perhaps I am wrong.

I hope I am wrong.

So if you want to read for pure pleasure, for the joy of the words tripping off the page, dancing images in your mind, and the sin of reading not for improvement or knowledge, but just for fun: Under Milk Wood.

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1. I always think it’s funny when that happens. I’m reading along, late at night, and the story – even a story that I’ve read a million times before – starts to go a new direction. And then I wake up and recognize that the story hasn’t changed, it’s still right there on the page where I left it, I just dreamt I was still reading, reading with my eyes closed, and my subconscious was making up the plot and the words. ↩︎
2. PBS. Check it out. Episodes available online. ↩︎