«أَشَابَ الصَّغِيرَ وَأَفْنَى الْكَبِيرَ كَرُّ الْغَدَاةِ وَمَرُّ الْعَشِيِّ»
The recurring mornings and passing evenings made the young grow gray and the old pass away.
The verbs ashaba (“made gray”) and afna (“brought to an end”) are ascribed to the passage of time. In the intended understanding, time is not itself an independent ultimate creator of such effects; the changes occur in association with its passage.
The figurative point lies in assigning these effects to the succession of morning and evening, rather than necessarily altering the lexical meaning of each verb.