This paper explores the indexical function enjambment serves in T. S. Eliot’s The Dry Salvages. The poem has long been considered prosaic, even prosy. By interrupting the syntax of the poem’s content, however, enjambment dissects temporal continuities, calling into question the continua presupposed in (post-)Aristotelian philosophy, the Western notion of historical progress as well as the ideology of manifest destiny. And yet, enjambment brings a very different kind of timelessness to bear than the eternal truths of religion to which Eliot is intent on lending his prophetic voice. Fearing to face the ‘pre-conscious’ and hence ‘primitive terror’ that asserts itself between their swells, his lines never fully turn around. Instead, the poem decides—after ‘a backward half-look’—to resolutely ‘fare forward’. Thus, enjambment can merely assert itself as an index pointing to an immemorial event insistent in each and every new swell. It is only in the final lines of the Four Quartets that Eliot fully heeds the index, lending his ear to what was only half-heard so far.