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Feast

Food And Drink
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 large celebratory meal. It represents abundance, communal joy, ritual, or appetite fulfilled.

Detailed Definition
The feast gives poets a broad scene of bodies, voices, vessels, music, and seasonal plenty. It may celebrate a wedding, harvest, homecoming, or military triumph, allowing food to become an expression of public order. At the same time, feasts often contain tension between host and guest, rich and poor, welcome and exclusion. Elegiac poems may remember a feast that cannot be repeated, making abundance a measure of loss.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Homeric epic, feasts often mark hospitality, alliance, and the restoration of social order; A feast can contrast sharply with war when soldiers eat together before battle; A poet might write, “The feast blazed under lanterns while beyond the wall the storm rehearsed its grief,” creating tension between celebration and threat; In a harvest poem, a communal feast can represent gratitude for land, labor, and shared survival
Additional Notes
A feast is communal as well as abundant; it may symbolize ritual welcome, reconciliation, harvest, or appetite fulfilled.
Also Known As
Banquet Repast
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