["Book 3" from V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore and David Lloyd]

On page 196, V quotes William Butler Yeats poem, saying, "This is not anarchy, Eve. This is chaos... 'Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart... The centre cannot hold.'"

I actually had to analyze the poem, "The Second Coming," earlier this semester for my English 285 (Post-Colonial Lit) class. Here it is in its full-text:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre*

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

We discussed its relation to Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart, and to colonization's effects in general. Alan Moore didn't pick it wrongly, either; it definitely applies to V for Vendetta. The "widening gyre" bit can symbolize time falling in on itself, which is directly related to anarchy: the government in the novel is falling in on itself, as well as its hold on the people. "The falcon cannot hear the falconer" symbolizes that the people cannot hear their Leader/leaders. Obviously, "the centre cannot hold" is a direct reference to the central government being unable to hold together and/or to hold power.


*gyres (n.): 1. (as used by Yeats) two, spiraling geometic forms (cones, technically) that intersect; symbolizes the inevitable movement of time; everything (all time and space) is contained with the gyres; used to represent dualities (like peace vs. war) 2. (as used by Lewis Carroll) used in "Jabberwocky" and Through the Looking Glass; Humpty Dumpty says that a gyre goes "round and round like a gyroscope"