Long Day's Journey Into Night

It is midnight. Tyrone plays solitaire alone, and he is visibly drunk. Edmund arrives, also drunk. Tyrone tells Edmund to turn out the light in the front hall, but Edmund refuses. Tyrone gets angry but remembers Edmund’s illness, becoming sad. Tyrone tells him to leave the light on, saying everyone ends up in the “poor-house” eventually. Tyrone complains about Jamie, noting he is drunk with a sex worker, but Edmund stops him. Edmund says he walked along the beach, stopping at the Inn on the way home, noting the fog. Tyrone mentions Edmund’s health as they pour drinks, but Edmund muses poetically on the fog as a distraction. Tyrone compliments Edmund’s poetry despite its pessimism, but he prefers Shakespeare.

Edmund quotes from Charles Baudelaire, a French Decadent poet encouraging an inebriated appreciation of life. Tyrone appreciates the poem but maintains a preference for Shakespeare. Edmund claims that Baudelaire wrote a poem about Jamie before Jamie was born, quoting another poem regarding the pleasures found in being an outcast. Tyrone calls it “filth” and says Baudelaire was an atheist. Edmund quotes Ernest Dowson’s poem “Cynara,” saying that he can imagine Jamie reciting the poem to a sex worker.