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Darien

Historical Location
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 region around the Isthmus of Panama, historically known as the Darién, linking Central and South America through dense terrain.

Detailed Definition
Darien refers to the area in Central America associated with early Spanish exploration. Keats ends the poem with this place-name to complete the image of discovery and arrival at a new world.
Example
Example in poetry:
Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” ends, “Silent, upon a peak in Darien,” using Darien as a place of astonished discovery; The allusion evokes Balboa’s view of the Pacific, though Keats famously names “stout Cortez” instead; “A peak in Darien” has become shorthand for encountering an immense new intellectual world; A contemporary poem can invoke Darien when describing a breakthrough in science, migration, or art
Additional Notes
"Darien" is a specific place-name that most readers would not recognize without identification.; Found in the poem, On first looking into Chapman's Homer by John Keats
Also Known As
paradise utopia Eden promised land
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