Does anyone have a definitive answer for the origin of this phrase? I've googled it but there seems to be lots of conjecture - anyone actually know ? Ta!
Dave, I've looked through literally dozens of quotation and idiom websites as well as books of those on my shelves here and none of them mentions the phrase. I suspect it is simply an 'invention' of Val McDermid's. She's the author of the original novel on which the TV series is based. There is an e-mail address [email protected] It might be worth asking the lady herself, as it were, where she got the concept from!
It comes from TS Eliot's Burnt Norton. Second verse:
Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.