This passage from T. S. Eliot’s poem The Dry Salvages is one of my favorite.  There are many phrases in these lines that are analogous to an arrow striking dead center to the bulls eye.  The poem overall is a meditation upon a seafaring way of life.  The point of view offered proposes to be timeless, a true statement of the human experience from the beginnings of our late paleolithic ancestors of 15,000 years ago to the present.  Ironic wouldn’t you say, since the poets subject is the meaning of time!? 

Do you go to church?  Do you pray?  Maybe you are agnostic?  Eliot suggests an inevitable, unavoidable wordless prayer, a response to life-as-such that rises from the core of our being.  This silent prayer is evoked by the very experience of being alive as a time-bound-creature.  “The bone’s prayer to Death its God,” is a masterful phrasing of something that is quite beyond description.

I should say no more about these lines.  Further commentary would be wide of the point, Eliot’s words will speak to your mind/heart according to your individual history, and receptive ability.  The final image of a 19th century antebellum river boat sticks in my mind though:

Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,
The bitter apple, and the bite in the apple.

Indeed,

People change, and smile: but the agony abides.
Time the destroyer is time the preserver,

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II

   There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,
No end to the withering of withered flowers,
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,
To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,
The bone’s prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable
Prayer of the one Annunciation.

   It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness. I have said before
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations—not forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable:
The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.
Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony
(Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,
Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,
Is not in question) are likewise permanent
With such permanence as time has. We appreciate this better
In the agony of others, nearly experienced,
Involving ourselves, than in our own.
For our own past is covered by the currents of action,
But the torment of others remains an experience
Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.
People change, and smile: but the agony abides.
Time the destroyer is time the preserver,
Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,
The bitter apple, and the bite in the apple.
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.