He states, "The little graveyard where my people are!" (24). The reader is made aware of some kind of death from which the wife suffers. The exclamation point in this phrase signals to the reader the husband's sudden realization of what is the root of his wife's emotion. From here the tension beings to escalate again, evoking in the reader an anticipation that one gets from the ups and downs of a roller coaster. .
By the end of the second stanza the reader understands the exact cause of the tension within the poem. The husband acknowledges, "But I understand: it is not the stones, but the child's mound-," (30-31). The death of a child is now apparent to the reader, which causes great emotion in both the speakers, and the reader. As the reader, you feel so sad for such an apparent tragedy. I, as the reader feel the anguish and suffering here more than I ever imagined I could from a poem. It is the dialogue and the statement of the obvious that allows emotions to soar. It prods at the reader to push further on, deeper into the poem. .
It becomes overwhelmingly tense as the poem progresses from here. The wife, "withdrew, shrinking from beneath his arms," (33). It is here that the reader understands that the relationship between the husband and wife is suffering. The wife is pushing the husband away, maybe blaming him for the child's death. Both husband and wife are breaking inside everything that was good and wholesome is crumbling around them. Frost is encompassing his readers in an extremely personal moment, engaging dialogue with tension regarding conflicts that were not normally addressed to the public. Frost is playing with all boundaries at this point, making his work totally abstract and new to all previous poetry. Modernism focuses on the "I", which is filtered from Romantic traits. However, in this piece the readers get to see two separate "I's" here. It creates depth for the tension, reinventing the "I" in the Modernistic era.