The poem picks up immediately after Lazarus's death, with his wife saying
I had grieved. I had wept for a night and a day
Anaphora (the repetition of "I had") starts the poem off on an insistent note, making it feel as though Mrs. Lazarus is trying to convince readers that she had indeed mourned her husband thoroughly.
Mrs. Lazarus's immense grief is the first thing the reader learns about her, and she goes on to describe it in great detail. She wept and tore at her clothing (the "cloth" she was "married in," to be precise). She "howled" and "shrieked" with anguish. She "clawed" at Lazarus's tomb until her "hands bled." She "retched" (or dry heaved) "his name," suggesting that the very thought of his death made her physically ill.
Her mourning, these violent images make clear, wasn't perfunctory; it seemed to almost consume her. Just listen to the repetition in line 5:
his name over and over again, dead, dead.
The diacope of "over" emphasizes the relentless nature of her grief, while the epizeuxis of "dead" suggests that she couldn't quite wrap her mind around what happened. She seems to have been in shock over her husband's death.
The poem is written in free verse, so there's no meter or rhyme scheme. This allows the poem to feel more intimate and direct. Meanwhile, the use of asyndeton (the lack of coordinating conjunctions between clauses) gives the stanza a hurried, frantic feel. The actions come at the reader thick and fast, as though Mrs. Lazarus has no time to catch her breath.
Alliteration also contributes to the intensity of this opening stanza. The blunt /b/ sounds in "breasts," "burial," and "bled," for example, help to convey just how battered Mrs. Lazarus has been by this loss.