The literary device Maya Angelou uses in her poem 'Women Work' is referred to as Anaphora.
Anaphora is a rhetorical device which uses repetition of certain words at the start of adjacent lines. This allows the emphasis to be placed on to the words that fall into the repetition pattern.
In the first stanza of the poem, Angelou exclaims:
In this example, the author is using anaphora to emphasise the draining and difficult level of her work.I've got the children to tend
The clothes to mend
The floor to mop
The food to shop
Then the chicken to fry
The baby to dry
I got company to feed
The garden to weed
I've got shirts to press
The tots to dress
The can to be cut
I gotta clean up this hut
Then see about the sick
And the cotton to pick.
The repetition of the pattern is emblematic of the repetitiveness of her everyday life.
This is cleverly done since the verbs on every line (her actions) are at the tail of the sentence, and are subsequently repeated one after another in rhyme to heavily emphasise the very tasks she is facing.
