THERE ARE FEW writings in the English language more beautiful ...

Name the greatest serendipitous recording: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes? A strong contender. The illicit Carnegie Hall capture of Sviatoslav Richter's Appassionata? Magnificent. A clean half-decade later, I'd give the prize to Thomas and company's reading of his only play, Under Milk Wood. Technically, I suppose, it isn't "music" (though it includes songs). But, "?the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack fishingboat-bobbing sea." Sing that to yourself.

A knock-together put on at a New York WMCA, featuring Thomas and five out-of-work actors, the reading exists only because, at the last minute, someone unnamed placed a microphone on the stage floor. Without that, we'd have only memories and afterthoughts. Thomas died six months later, at age 39, of alcohol or an emergency-room error?take your pick. Nothing he ever said or read in that crooning, roaring, keening, loving, rambunctious voice surpassed that evening of May 14, 1953.

Under Milk Wood takes us through a single spring day in the life of the Welsh town of Llareggub. Though Welsh himself and attuned to the music of language, Thomas, strangely, spoke no Welsh. It's a measure of his subversive sense of humor that "Llareggub" is "buggerall" spelled backwards.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the reading is that this group of mostly unknown actors (Nancy Wickwire is the only name I recognize, and I don't know from where) totally inhabit Thomas' language and characters. Given several roles each, they shift, swell, diminish and syncopate with deceptive ease. (There's a version out with Richard Burton. I haven't heard it and likely never will.)

On one level, the play is a paean to small-town life, though it's also a catalog of the spiritual tackiness, intolerance and borderline lunacy that such towns can encompass. The overriding tone is one of wonder and appreciation for the variety of the human beast.

It details the lives of such characters as blind Captain Cat, organist Organ Morgan ("it's organ, organ all the time with him"), bigamist Dai Bread the baker, would-be spousicide Mr. Pugh, Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard (who harangues her long-dead husbands), the easy-loving Polly Garter (still mourning "little Willy Wee, who is dead, dead, dead"), pub-owner Sinbad Sailors, his grandmother Mary Ann the Sailors, Nogood Boyo and slow-witted Bessie Bighead.

The humor in Under Milk Wood is roll-on-the-floor funny, the pathos heart-tightening but fully earned. The language sings, but it sings of a real world that exists as a bedrock stratum below the surface of Thomas' loving grotesques. We hear of an aged pair cupped in their bed "like two old kippers in a box." We see Mr. Pugh sitting across from his wife, reading a brown-wrapped copy of Lives of the Great Poisoners (which she has already spied in the mail). We read the love letters of draper Mog Edwards written to Myfanwy Price, whom it seems he will never touch and whose room he will never enter.

It's beyond me to pick and choose from all the lush and lyrical bits, so let's close with this snatch of children's doggerel, echoed by Captain Cat:

"Johnny Crack and Flossie Snail

Kept their baby in a milking pail.

One would put it back and one would pull it out

And all it had to drink was ale and stout

For Johnny Crack and Flossie Snail

Always used to say that stout and ale

Was good for a baby in a milking pail."

What's Out There: Alone, the Thomas reading of Under Milk Wood seems to be available only on cassette. But you can buy his full Caedmon readings on a CD set. Do. And don't forget the paperback of Under Milk Wood (finished a few months after the reading, with some differing dialogue).