The anaphora that appears in this poem is concentrated in its final two stanzas, working to build anticipation and momentum as the poem's conclusion nears. All three examples of this poetic device give structure to lists of services that the speaker claims a wife would perform for the applicant. In doing so, anaphora also allows the speaker to create links between the miscellaneous purported advantages of marriage.
In lines 31-32, anaphora sets up a comparison between "twenty-five years" and "fifty" as well as a comparison between "silver" and "gold":
But in twenty-five years she'll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
Thus, the repetition of "in" emphasizes the potential wife's accrual of value over time, indicating that she has little inherent value and it will take decades of dedicated commitment to prove her merit. This insinuation also signals to the applicant that he will be rewarded based on the longevity of his commitment.
Anaphora appears again in lines 34-35, which list three stereotypical qualities of the 20th-century housewife—she sews, cooks, and has a tendency to drone on without saying anything of substance:
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.
Anaphora unites these three clichés, creating a simple, compact image of the ideal stereotypical housewife. Furthermore, the anaphora, aided by asyndeton, creates a repeating metrical pattern (unstressed-unstressed-stressed) that gains momentum before being abandoned as line 35 trails off:
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.
This break from the anticipated rhythm causes the phrase "talk, talk, talk" to come across as very elongated due to its string of three stressed syllables, instead of the expected one. As a result, this line's rhythm reflects the droning that it describes and draws attention to the potential wife's penchant to go on and on. The various forms of repetition within this sentence match the idea that she will perform the same tasks over and over again. In this way, the repetitive meter is consistent with the monotony of her expected life.
The poem's third and final example of anaphora occurs in lines 37-38, where the speaker gives examples of the various roles that the applicant's potential wife would be able to fulfill.:
You have a hole, it's a poultice.
You have an eye, it's an image.
She is said to become a dressing when the applicant is wounded, and an image when he desires something to gaze upon. By setting these starkly different needs side-by-side, anaphora conveys that wives are expected to shape themselves around the needs of men and keep up with their ever-changing impulses. Additionally, the anaphora creates identical sentence structures (i.e. parallelism) and meter for lines 37 and 38, reflecting the consistency with which wives are expected to submit to their husbands' needs.