Home › Glossary › Letter D

Dithyrambic hymn

Genre
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

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 frenzied, lyrical hymn from antiquity honoring Dionysus, marked by irregular rhythms, emotional excess, and communal ritual performance.

Detailed Definition
Dithyrambic hymn is an ecstatic, irregularly structured choral song originally dedicated to Dionysus, characterized by wild rhythms, passionate imagery, and improvisatory energy; in modern poetry, it denotes any fervent, rhapsodic lyric celebrating divine or natural frenzy.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Euripides’ “The Bacchae,” dithyrambic hymns praise Dionysus with ecstatic rhythm; In Hölderlin’s “Bread and Wine,” dithyrambic hymn merges Greek myth with Christian longing; In Nietzsche’s “Dionysian Dithyrambs,” poetic frenzy celebrates tragic joy; In contemporary poetry, Anne Carson’s “Autobiography of Red” uses dithyrambic energy for queer myth; In Ocean Vuong’s “Aubade with Burning City,” disco music becomes modern dithyrambic hymn amid war.
Additional Notes
Hymn in dithyrambic style: ecstatic, metrically free, enthusiastic. Celebrates divine or transcendent subject with wild energy. Related to Dionysian versus Apollonian aesthetics. Contrast with measured hymn forms.
Also Known As
Bacchic hymn Wild choral song Frenzied praise poem Ecstatic chorus
Skip to main content