Perhaps the central thematic and tonal tension in the poem is between the mundane, day-to-day world Prufrock inhabits and the internal world in which his spiritual crisis unfolds. The mundane world is London, both seedy and dainty, full of “one-night cheap hotels,” “the soot that falls from chimneys,” and “the cups, the marmalade, the tea.” The internal world is where Prufrock reflects on his experiences and considers daring to ask the “overwhelming question” that looms over his thoughts. 

The division between the physical and metaphysical dimensions of Prufrock’s life is significant for several reasons. It marks Prufrock’s detachment from his surroundings, which float through his awareness, dreamlike and disordered, altered as they are by his imagination. The division is important, too, in the way it produces a contrast that accentuates his spiritual angst, such as when Prufrock wonders,

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question…

The contrast between the bric-a-brac of tea and porcelain and the “overwhelming question” produces a note of comedic lightness while underlining the fundamental gravity of Prufrock’s situation. Finally, the gulf between Prufrock’s inner and outer worlds creates a problem of communication. He finds that “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” Given the intensity of his inner crisis and the frivolity of the social world around him, Prufrock remains trapped in his condition of solitary questioning and yearning. His “overwhelming question” is left unmasked and unasked, and the mundane world rolls onward in its everyday course. This central tension—between meaning and mundanity, between inner and outer experience—is never resolved.