The title “Woman Work” lets the reader know right away what this poem will be about: women's labor. And in the opening lines, the speaker dives right in by describing some of the work that she has to do: she must take care of the children, patch up clothes, clean the floor, and shop for food. All of these are domestic chores that women have, historically, been expected to do without pay or recognition.
The poetic devices that Angelou uses here evoke the drudgery of this work. For example, the anaphora of these lines (that repetition of "The" over and over again) makes the list feel monotonous and relentless. Each line also ends with a verb (“tend,” “mend,” “mop,” and “shop”). This broader parallelism adds to the sense of an unending routine—that the speaker has to do all of this work, day after day.
The list also uses asyndeton: the speaker omits conjunctions (like “and”) that might typically connect list items together. This speeds the poem up and also suggests that when the speaker completes one task, she must quickly go on to the next, with no time to rest.
Adding to that sense of relentlessness is the poem's steady rhythm. While the poem doesn't stick to one meter overall, it does very often repeat the exact same, or close to the same, pattern in two lines in a row. This whole first section follows an iambic meter, for the most part—a bouncy rhythm consisting of unstressed beats followed by stressed beats (da-DUM). Take lines 2-3:
The floor to mop
The food to shop
Even the sounds of the words themselves here are repetitive, as in the alliteration of “floor” and “food.” The quick, simple rhyme scheme makes the lines feel monotonous and predictable: “tend” rhymes with “mend,” while “mop” rhymes with “shop,” creating an easy AABB pattern. The speaker knows exactly what she's expected to do, and goes through the motions quickly and efficiently.