the complete consort dancing together

Time for more poetry, as I am too busy to finish the film reviews etc. for now. I am slogging though a difficult editing project (ideas, content, argument = superb, facility with the English language = not so much) and found myself thinking of some lines from Eliot. I love The Four Quartets (perhaps best of all his poetry), and "Little Gidding" is my favorite of them, for its explorations of history, memory, and context, its fugue-like repetitions and scriptural echoes, with Julian of Norwich ('all shall be well, and all shall be well') woven throughout like a bright embroidery. The other day on the phone S. announced that she might borrow an Eliot line for her dissertation title; I remembered how I took epigraphs for undergraduate historiography essays from these poems (I'll leave it up to you to guess what). Anyhow, the whole great edifice is here, but the lines I was thinking of this morning were these, especially the bit in the parentheses:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.

'The common word exact without vulgarity/The formal word precise but not pedantic'--I should send that back scrawled across the top of every red-inked draft.