Under Milk Wood

Throughout Under Milk Wood, Mog Edwards and Myfanwy Price declare their love for each other in letters, but they never meet in person, so they are never able to physically affirm their love. Their relationship exists only in the abstract, as an idealized affair that they dare not bring into being for fear that it might not measure up to their expectations. The relationship between Mog and Myfanwy functions as an analogy for Dylan Thomas’s relationship with Llareggub and Wales as a whole. The small town portrayed in Under Milk Wood is a fictional, idealized Welsh town that exists only in the play, just as Mog and Myfanwy’s idealized relationship exists only in the letters. By setting the play in Llareggub rather than one of the real Welsh coastal towns in which Thomas lived, he is able to interrogate an idealized past, one colored by nostalgia and grief. Thomas can never go to Llareggub, just as Mog and Myfanwy can never meet, lest the reality fail to live up to the idealized version that exists in their minds.

At the beginning of the play, Waldo insists that people refer to him as “widower Waldo,” constructing his identity around his grief. He struggles to understand himself and his place in the community in any other context than the absence of his wife. Waldo is not alone in his efforts to navigate grief. Polly Garter sings frequently about Willy Weazel, whose death still pains her. She has a reputation in the town as a “promiscuous” woman but, as she explains through song, her relationships are an attempt to fill the void in her life left by the absence of Willy Weazel. At the end of the play, Polly and Waldo meet in Milk Wood. They enter into a sexual relationship, even though they are thinking about other people. The physical act of sex is a way in which they can attempt to navigate their grief, finding sympathy in one another’s arms. That they are still thinking about the dead, however, suggests that even this sympathetic coupling cannot fully heal the pain of loss. Grief can be managed, they discover, but never truly defeated.

As Under Milk Wood comes to an end, so too does the day, and the townspeople continue to follow their routines, obeying The Patterns of Existence that have dictated their lives throughout the play. The implication is that the same patterns will continue the next day. The narrative purposely rejects dramatic progression. There is no real story to move forward, because Llareggub itself exists outside of the boundaries of space and time. As the Voice of a Guide-Book suggested, Llareggub’s charm lies in the way it embodies a nuanced nostalgia, one that is not solely positive but also affected by grief and pain. It will continue to exist in its fictional state as an abstracted ideal against which the present is judged. The lack of narrative progression is the point, as Llareggub can never escape its moment in time and space. It is a town shaped by nostalgia, in the most positive and most negative sense.