"A Woman's Last Word" is a dramatic monologue told from the perspective of a woman who has been arguing with her lover. It begins with the speaker addressing her partner, begging him to "contend no more"—or lay their argument to rest—so that they can go to "sleep."
There's nothing particularly out of the ordinary in this opening stanza. It's natural for couples to disagree, and sometimes debates between lovers can be quite passionate! It's clear this argument was a doozy—given that the speaker wishes both parties would stop "Striv[ing]" and "weep[ing]—but the poem gives no indication as to what the cause of the fight was in the first place. What's important to the speaker, now, is that they make up—that things go back to how they were "before" the fight began.
This opening stanza establishes the poem's form. Each stanza is a quatrain (it has four lines) written in a mixture of trochaic trimeter and trochaic dimeter. Odd-numbered lines contain three trochees (poetic feet with syllables arranged in a stressed unstressed pattern: DUM-da) while even-numbered lines contain two.
Here's the meter of this opening quatrain to illustrate this:
Let's con- | tend no | more, Love,
Strive nor | weep—
All be | as be- | fore, Love,
—Only | sleep!
Trochaic meter creates what's known as a falling rhythm. Here, the movement from firm stressed to softer unstressed syllables subtly mirrors the fact that the speaker is giving in, trying to placate her beloved.
Note, however, that the shorter, even-numbered lines are also catalectic: they're missing their final unstressed syllables. As a result, they feel blunter, more clipped, than they otherwise might—evocative of someone who's determined to have "the last word."
The poem also follows a simple ABAB rhyme scheme: the first and third lines of each stanza rhyme with each other, as do the second and fourth. Notice that the "A" rhyme in this first stanza is in fact an identical rhyme: "Love" and "Love." This repetition draws more attention to the speaker's pet name for her partner, highlighting her attempts to calm and soothe him.