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Eager

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 enthusiastic anticipation, yearning, or passionate desire, often conveyed through urgent diction or forward-leaning syntax.

Detailed Definition
Eager mood in poetry conveys excited readiness through quick pacing, forward-leaning syntax, and vivid anticipation; it appears in dawn poems, love sonnets, or journey narratives—like Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”—where the speaker’s keen expectation transforms the present into a threshold of possibility, infusing language with kinetic energy and hope.
Example
Example in poetry:
In “The Road Not Taken,” Frost’s speaker is eager to choose a path, though uncertain of consequences; Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road” exudes eager anticipation for adventure (“Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road”); In “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats is eager to escape into the bird’s world; Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day” ends with an eager question about living fully; Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” shows eager kinship in shared anonymity; In “Still I Rise,” Maya Angelou expresses eager defiance and resilience.
Additional Notes
Eager mood expresses enthusiastic anticipation or readiness; conveyed through forward-leaning syntax, active verbs, and bright imagery—e.g., dawn or spring motifs; related to zealous, fervent, and animated moods; differs from exuberant in its focus on future possibility rather than present joy.
Also Known As
Enthusiastic Keen Excited Avid Impatient
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