Home › Glossary › Letter M

Miserable

Mood
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 mood conveying profound unhappiness, distress, or despair, often expressed through bleak diction, oppressive imagery, or rhythmic heaviness.

Detailed Definition
Miserable mood in poetry conveys profound suffering through stark imagery, broken rhythm, and raw diction; it appears in confessional verse, poverty poems, or illness lyrics—like Plath or early Eliot—where the speaker’s pain is unvarnished and immediate, using language to make emotional or physical agony palpable, demanding witness without offering easy solace.
Example
Example in poetry:
In “The Raven,” Poe’s speaker is miserable in his grief over Lenore; Emily Dickinson’s “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” conveys miserable mental collapse; In “Dover Beach,” Matthew Arnold describes a miserable world without joy; Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips” renders hospital recovery as miserable; Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” opens with a miserable winter landscape; In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the speaker’s self-loathing creates miserable paralysis.
Additional Notes
Miserable mood conveys acute unhappiness or discomfort; rendered through visceral imagery, discordant sounds, and oppressive rhythm—e.g., urban poverty or illness poems; related to dejected, disconsolate, and despondent moods; more immediate and physical than melancholic.
Also Known As
Wretched Mournful Woeful Distressed Unhappy Disconsolate Dreich
Skip to main content