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Anxious

Mood
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A poetic mood marked by tension, restlessness, or apprehension, often conveyed through fragmented syntax, urgent rhythm, or dark imagery.

Detailed Definition
Anxious mood in poetry reflects inner tension through fragmented lines, urgent pacing, and uncertain imagery; it appears in confessional or modernist works—like Plath or Eliot—where the speaker grapples with fear of the future, social judgment, or existential instability, making psychological distress palpable through form and diction.
Example
Example in poetry:
In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Eliot’s speaker expresses anxiety through hesitant questions (“Do I dare?”) and images of paralysis; Robert Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night” conveys anxious isolation through the speaker’s solitary walks and avoidance of eye contact; In “Mirror,” Sylvia Plath captures anxiety about aging through the mirror’s “unmisted” truth and the woman’s “tears and an agitation of hands”; W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” juxtaposes human suffering with indifferent surroundings, evoking anxious awareness of others’ pain; In “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop masks deep anxiety about loss with a controlled villanelle form; The trembling uncertainty in Emily Dickinson’s “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” (“And then a Plank in Reason, broke”) conveys profound anxiety about mental collapse.
Additional Notes
Anxious mood reflects unease, worry, or anticipatory dread; frequently conveyed through hesitant phrasing, rhetorical questions, or dissonant sounds; appears in modernist poetry (e.g., T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”) and war poetry; closely linked to apprehensive, uneasy, or worried moods; useful for exploring internal conflict or existential uncertainty.
Also Known As
Worried Nervous Apprehensive Uneasy Edgy Restless Tense On pins and needles Heart in one's mouth
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