Still Points and Shared Sonnets

One of the beautiful parts of Gaudy Night (and there are many) is when Harriet finds that Lord Peter has discovered her half-written sonnet (which she couldn't manage to finish) and completes it:

"This was the unfinished sonnet--and of all the idiotic things to do, to leave half-finished sonnets mixed up with one's detective work for other people to see! A schoolgirl trick, enough to make anybody blush. ... But here it was: and in the interval it had taken to itself a sestet and stood, looking a little unbalanced, with her own sprawling hand above and Peter's deceptively neat script below, like a large top on a small spindle.

Here then at home, by no more storms distrest,
Folding laborious hands we sit, wings furled;
Here in close perfume lies the rose-leaf curled,
Here the sun stands and knows not east nor west,
Here no tide runs; we have come, last and best,
From the wide zone in dizzying circles hurled
To that still centre where the spinning world
Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.

Lay on the whips, O Love, that we upright,
Poised on the perilous point, in no lax bed
May sleep, as tension at the verberant core
Of music sleeps; for, if thou spare to smite,
Staggering, we stoop, stooping, fall dumb and dead,
And, dying so, sleep our sweet sleep no more.

Having achieved this, the poet appeared to have lost countenance; for he had added the comment:

'A very conceited, metaphysical conclusion!'

So. So there was the turn she had vainly sought for the sestet! Her beautiful, big, peaceful humming-top turned to a whip-top, and sleeping, as it were, upon compulsion. (And, damn him! how dared he pick up her word 'sleep' and use it four times in as many lines, and each time in a different foot, as though juggling with the accent-shift were child's play? And drag out the last half-line with those great, heavy, drugged, drowsy monosyllabes, contradicting the sense so as to deny their own contradiction? It was not one of the world's great sestets, but it was considerably better than her own octave: which was monstrous of it.)"

This is to say nothing of the discussion of polyphonic music at the end, when Harriet and Lord Peter get engaged (get engaged sounds so vulgar--I'm sure, for instance, that Myrrh and Warren didn't "get engaged," but rather, "engaged themselves to one another" or something like that).

Also, Sayers (or should I say "Harriet and Peter"?) on the still point reminds me of Eliot:

"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance."

I guess others wrote about this theme, as well (although the only one that comes to my mind is Yeats' "the centre cannot hold"), which would be an interesting study.