gyre - Uses in literature

A large semi-enclosed ocean circulation cell made up of surface currents. As these circulate around the oceans, the currents which make up their limbs receive, store, and give up heat to the atmosphere and adjacent ocean currents, resulting in temperature changes in the surface water. In many cases the heat transported by gyres strongly influences the weather and climate of surrounding land areas.

Uses in literature

Lewis Carroll used the word as a verb in the opening stanza of his poem "Jabberwocky", defining it as "to go round and round like a gyroscope."

The word was also used by William Butler Yeats for an occult historical concept presented in his book A Vision (a book whose ideas Yeats claimed to receive from spirits of the dead). The theory of history articulated in A Vision centers on a diagram composed of two conical spirals, one situated inside the other, so that the widest part of one cone occupies the same plane as the tip of the other cone, and vice versa. Yeats claimed that this image (he called the spirals "gyres") captured contrary motions inherent within the process of history, and he divided each gyre into different regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the phases of an individual's psychological development).