It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black.

This line is the celebrated opening of Dylan Thomas’s radio “play for voices,” Under Milk Wood, first broadcast by the BBC in 1954 (after Thomas’s death in 1953). The work evokes a single day in the fictional Welsh seaside village of Llareggub, drawing on Thomas’s memories of small-town life in Wales (often associated with Laugharne and other Carmarthenshire settings). The narrator’s nocturnal prologue establishes the town in darkness and quiet before the play moves into the dreams and inner lives of its inhabitants, a hallmark of Thomas’s lyrical, auditory style written for performance rather than the page.

The sentence compresses time, place, and mood into a single incantatory image. “Spring” suggests renewal, yet the “moonless…starless” night denies natural illumination, creating a thick, enclosing darkness. “Bible-black” intensifies the tone: it evokes the physical blackness of old, leather-bound Bibles and the moral or metaphysical weight associated with scripture, implying a darkness that is not merely visual but cultural and spiritual. As an opening, it prepares the listener for a work in which ordinary village life is rendered mythic and dreamlike, and where the unseen—memory, desire, guilt, longing—speaks as loudly as the visible world.