In the following passage from Scene 1, Paddy uses imagery to paint a romanticized picture of the past, describing the voyage of an older merchant vessel, likely from the 17th or 18th century:
PADDY: Oh, to be scudding south again wid the power of the Trade Wind driving her on steady through the nights and the days! Full sail on her! Nights and days! Nights when the foam of the wake would be flaming wid fire, when the sky’d be blazing and winking wid stars. Or the full of the moon maybe.
In his monologue, Paddy uses vivid imagery to describe the ship of his imagination. The voyage this vessel takes is larger than life, moving through nights "when the foam of the wake would be flaming wid fire." While the waves could not literally be on fire, Paddy uses this bit of exaggeration to blend reality and fantasy. Paddy rejects modernity and industrialization, viewing these things as dehumanizing. Instead, he prefers to ruminate on imagined scenes of nature and epic voyage. For Yank, on the other hand, it is necessary that he find humanity in the industrialized, modern world because the alternative is too grim. In this way, Paddy and Yank emerge as foils for one another.
In the following excerpt from the beginning of Scene 2, the audience is introduced to Mildred and her aunt, both of whom are wealthy. O'Neill romanticizes neither woman, and he doesn't romanticize their upper-class lifestyle, either. On the contrary, he directs a pair of brutal similes against them, generating an image of contrast between their supposed superior position and the reality of their behavior:
In the midst of this, these two incongruous, artificial figures, inert and disharmonious, the elder like a gray lump of dough touched up with rouge, the younger looking as if the vitality of her stock had been sapped before she was conceived, so that she is the expression not of its life energy but merely of the artificialities that energy had won for itself in the spending.
Mildred's aunt is a "gray lump of dough touched up with rouge," while Mildred herself, despite her youth, appears to completely lack vitality. O'Neill implies that this lack of vitality was out of Mildred's control and simply a condition of her wealth and family. Ironically, one might assume that through eugenic logic, Mildred would appear healthy and full of vitality, given that she is from wealthy, successful "stock"—but this is not so! Her lack of distinguishing characteristics to justify her "superiority" is as resounding a statement against eugenic science as one could make indirectly.
