The first three lines of the next stanza connect it with the previous one by use of the feline-like yellow fog reference:
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
Like the feline imagery of the previous stanza, this one is entirely consumed with the motif of time. There are no less than ten uses or allusions to the word. The narrator asserts there will be time for the fog to fulfill its purpose, whatever the reader understands that purpose to be.
He then affirms the presence of time, time available, and time afforded for many purposes of our human endeavors.
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
There will be plenty of time to put on the facade, the mask, if you please, for all the different kinds of people one will meet. It is assumed there will be many people to meet and many opportunities and justifications to put on airs for people in the city.
Prufrock expects to or at least envisions himself mingling with cultured people—particularly women of society. Additionally, there will be time to murder and create—both have a tendency toward procrastination. In other words, there will be time to do the hard things, the sometimes necessary things.
He continues positing there will be time for everything there is to do, time for each of them to be individuals, and most importantly, there will be time to answer the overwhelming question that has yet to be asked. The references to time here appear to be assuring his companion—and most likely himself—that he still has time to put off the difficult question, to change his mind, a hundred times if necessary, even before tea time.
The tension is still in the need to ask a question, but the question is too overwhelming for him to ask.
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