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Weary

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

Conveying a mood of profound fatigue, resignation, or emotional depletion; often reflected in tone, diction, or imagery of weariness and longing.

Detailed Definition
Weary mood in poetry conveys deep fatigue through slow rhythm, faded imagery, and resigned diction; it appears in war elegies, labor poems, or late-life reflections—like Owen or Hardy—where the speaker’s energy is spent, rendering emotional or physical exhaustion with poignant honesty, honoring the dignity in endurance even when hope seems distant.
Example
Example in poetry:
In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the speaker is weary of social pretense; In “Dover Beach,” Matthew Arnold is weary of a joyless world; Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips” conveys weary hospital recovery; Emily Dickinson’s “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” describes weary numbness; In “The Waste Land,” T.S. Eliot’s characters show weary spiritual emptiness; Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” contrasts a weary landscape with a bird’s song.
Additional Notes
Weary mood conveys exhaustion of body or spirit; rendered through slow pace, heavy imagery, and minimal energy—e.g., war fatigue or aging poems; overlaps with languid, listless, and resigned moods; distinct from sorrowful in its focus on depletion rather than grief.
Also Known As
Tired Exhausted Drained Fatigued Worn-out haggard
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