- Dylan Thomas / Under Milk Wood

"ROSIE PROBERT (Softly)

What seas did you see,
Tom Cat, Tom Cat,
In your sailoring days
Long long ago?
What sea beasts were
In the wavery green
When you were my master?

CAPTAIN CAT

I'll tell you the truth.
Seas barking like
seals, Blue seas and green,
Seas covered with eels
And mermen and whales.

ROSIE PROBERT

What seas did you sail
Old whaler when
On the blubbery waves
Between Frisco and Wales
You were my bosun?

CAPTAIN CAT

As true as I'm here
Dear you Tom Cat's tart
You landlubber Rosie
You cosy love
My easy as easy
My true sweetheart,
Seas green as a bean
Seas gliding with swans
In the seal-barking moon.

ROSIE PROBERT

What seas were rocking
My little deck hand
My favourite husband
In your seaboots and hunger
My duck my whaler
My honey my daddy
My pretty sugar sailor.
With my name on your belly
When you were a boy
Long long ago?

CAPTAIN CAT

I'll tell you no lies.
The only sea I saw
Was the seesaw sea
With you riding on it.
Lie down, lie easy.
Let me shipwreck in your thighs.

ROSIE PROBERT,

Knock twice, Jack,
At the door of my grave
And ask for Rosie.

CAPTAIN CAT

Rosie Probert.

ROSIE PROBERT

Remember her.
She is forgetting.
The earth which filled her mouth
Is vanishing from her.
Remember me.
I have forgotten you.
I am going into the darkness of the darkness for ever.
I have forgotten that I was ever born.

CHILD

Look,

FIRST VOICE

says a child to her mother as they pass by the window of
Schooner House,

CHILD

Captain Cat is crying

FIRST VOICE

Captain Cat is crying

CAPTAIN CAT

Come back, come back,

FIRST VOICE

up the silences and echoes of the passages of the eternal
night.

CHILD

He's crying all over his nose,

FIRST VOICE

says the child. Mother and child move on down the street.

CHILD

He's got a nose like strawberries,

FIRST VOICE

the child says; and then she forgets him too. She sees in
the still middle of the bluebagged bay Nogood Boyo fishing
from the Zanzibar.

CHILD

Nogood Boyo gave me three pennies yesterday but I wouldn't,

FIRST VOICE

the child tells her mother.

SECOND VOICE

Boyo catches a whalebone corset. It is all he has caught
all day.

NOGOOD BOYO

Bloody funny fish!

SECOND VOICE

Mrs Dai Bread Two gypsies up his mind's slow eye, dressed
only in a bangle.

NOGOOD BOYO

She's wearing her nightgown. (Pleadingly) Would you like
this nice wet corset, Mrs Dai Bread Two?

MRS DAI BREAD TWO

No, I won't!

NOGOOD BOYO

And a bite of my little apple?

SECOND VOICE

he offers with no hope.

FIRST VOICE

She shakes her brass nightgown, and he chases her out of
his mind; and when he comes gusting back, there in the
bloodshot centre of his eye a geisha girl grins and bows
in a kimono of ricepaper.

NOGOOD BOYO

I want to be good Boyo, but nobody'll let me,

FIRST VOICE

he sighs as she writhes politely. The land fades, the sea
flocks silently away; and through the warm white cloud
where he lies, silky, tingling, uneasy Eastern music
undoes him in a Japanese minute.

SECOND VOICE

The afternoon buzzes like lazy bees round the flowers
round Mae Rose Cottage. Nearly asleep in the field of
nannygoats who hum and gently butt the sun, she blows love
on a puffball.

MAE ROSE COTTAGE (Lazily)

He loves me
He loves me not
He loves me
He loves me not
He loves me!--the dirty old fool.

SECOND VOICE

Lazy she lies alone in clover and sweet-grass, seventeen
and never been sweet in the grass ho ho."