Which verb for a scrutiny?

And as I scrutinised the down-turned face
With that pointed narrowness of observation
We bear upon the first-met stranger at dawn

Sound familiar? That's Eliot In the second typed draft of 'Little Gidding', perhaps unconsciously echoing Milton's "narrower scrutiny" in Paradise Regained. Eliot reworked this in the third typed draft:

And as I bent upon the down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The first-met stranger in the first faint light

John Hayward - with whom Eliot corresponded at length during the process of revision - wrote in the margin 'scrutinised / bend a scrutiny?'. Perhaps it was an idiom with which Hayward was not familiar. I found an old page from the Palmyra Democrat (New York) of the 1890s with the phrase "He bent a scrutiny". "He would bend intent scrutiny to the dial" appears in Louis Joseph Vance's first in a series of novels about a jewel-thief turned detective - "The Lone Wolf" (1914), and Mrs Woodrow Wilson uses the figure in her 1917 book 'The Hornet's Nest' (a title which was incidentally used by former President Jimmy Carter for his novel about the Revolutionary War).

The phrase appears again in Vernon Watkins' poem 'Swedenborg's Skull'

Caught up from the waters of change by a traveller who bends
His piercing scrutiny

In the end Eliot decided on fixing a scrutiny rather than bending one.

As I fixed upon that down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The first-met stranger in the waning dusk