The speaker beings this long narrative poem with a stanza of exposition that sets the scene: a woman named Mary is sitting by a table waiting for her husband Warren to get home from "the market," so that she can inform him that the couple's old farmhand, Silas, has returned.
The way the speaker describes Mary's temperament and actions—she sits "musing on the lamp-flame at the table," revealing her calm and patience, then runs "on tip-toe" to meet her husband "in the doorway" and "put him on his guard"—gives readers some clues as to Mary's personality, the relationship between Mary and Warren, and the context behind the couple's relationship with Silas.
Mary tries to direct her husband: she physically pushes him through the door, then orders him to "be kind" before removing groceries from his arms and pulling him down to sit next to her. These actions grant readers a sense of the dynamic between the two: while readers can assume that Warren is the "man of the house" and likely has the power to make decisions, Mary holds her own. She has a certain view of the world and attempts to get her husband to share her perspective. The fact that Mary seems keen to break the news about Silas to her husband gently suggests a kind of tension around the farmhand's return; it certainly doesn't seem like Warren is going to be happy that Silas is back.
This stanza also establishes the poem's form. "The Death of the Hired Man" is written in a subtle blank verse: unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter is a meter in which each line of verse contains five iambs, poetic feet with an unstressed-stressed syllable pattern. Take lines 9-10:
She took | the mar- | ket things | from War- | ren's arms
And set | them on | the porch, | then drew | him down
To sit | beside | her on | the wood- | en steps.
The meter contains plenty of variations, which is common for blank verse and keeps the poem from sounding overly stiff or formal. Take lines 1 and 2, both of which open with a trochee (the opposite of an iamb, following a stressed-unstressed syllable pattern): "Mary," "Waiting." Variations like this keep the poem's language sounding natural and even quite prose-like.