The Dry Salvages contains one of my favorite passages in poetry

I know it's kind of crazy to write a short blog post on T.S. Eliot's "The Dry Salvages," or any of the 4 Quartets for that matter - these poems are as complex and dense and allusive as Ulysses or King Lear and, though I've come back to them time and again over the course of my lifetime of reading, I doubt I'll ever fully understand them - and I doubt anyone can without the aid of a key to Eliot at their side. That said, The Dry Salvages contains some extraordinary passages and some profound ideas that I will just touch on hoping to bring a little more attention to these poems, probably not read all that often today and, even among Eliot readers, probably overshadowed by the more accessible Prufrock and the more dramatic Wasteland. First, TDS has one of my favorite passages in all of poetry, which I can quote by memory but will also look up: We had the experience but missed the meaning,/And approach to the meaning restores the experience/In a different form..." - This passage perfectly and aphoristically captures, for me, the sense that we have later in life (or for that matter at any time in life) of trying to recall, recollect, or recover through writing (Proust, q.v.) any experience we have had in life - how returning through memory changes the experience and how accumulated experience (and wisdom, possibly) can change not only our memory of past experience but the past experience itself. If I every am so fortunate as to have a collection of stories published I would probably use this passage as an epigraph. And I'm not sure that Eliot's intended meaning is exactly what I draw from the passage, as he is apparently talking about religious vision: "the sudden illumination." TDS is obviously imbued with religious meaning, beginning with the opening passages about gods and the river god - and the ocean, and seafaring men and those who make their living from the sea. These first two sections of the poem are some of Eliot's best lyrical writing and one of the finest pieces of writing I know of about the New England coast - an element or a quality (and a region) that we don't often associate with Eliot. There are obvious religious connotations to fishing - and he makes these darker and deeper through his descriptions of the clanging buoy bells (Under the oppression of the silent fog/The tolling bell/Measures time not out time, rung by the unhurried/ground swell), like an angelus, Eliot notes. Then the poem opens and expands into discussion of Kirshna and Hinduism (readers of The Wasteland know of Eliot's interest in Asian religious thought - and at the end TDS becomes quieter and more compact - the lines are much shorter, and the imagery is spare, almost removed. One weakness of Eliot's verse, even in his greatest poems, is that he sometimes becomes too hortatory and declarative - notice how, when he becomes "preachy," he falls back on forms of the verb "to be," just making declarations and not allowing us to see and feel the truth of these declarations through images and turns of phrase (the rest is prayer, the gift half-understood is Incarnation, etc.). Though the end of TDS to me feels strained, there is far too much material in this poems to encompass in brief notes: literally, you could study every line.