In addition to ample doses of repetition, anaphora, and allusions to Sherlock Holmes and Napoleon, this comic poem uses the following poetic devices.
Rhyming couplets convey a pleasing, sing-song sense of rhythm that helps structure the poem, such as "paw" and "law" and "despair" and "there." Eliot also uses alliteration to create rhythm. Alliteration puts words beginning with the same consonant in close proximity: an example would be the repeated "f" sounds in "footprints," "found," and "file" in stanza five.
The speaker adopts a hyperbolic voice, which, along with the sing-song rhymes, gives the poem its tone of light-hearted humor. Hyperbole or exaggeration, is critical to humor, and this speaker lays it on thickly, crediting to the ever-missing Macavity increasingly larger and more absurd crimes. Macavity moves from being responsible for missing milk to being accused of stealing important Foreign Office treaties. The absurdity is underscored as the absence of evidence of Macavity's...
(The entire section contains 3 answers and 857 words.)
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