Langston Hughes utilizes inversion, the technique of inverting the usual word order of a sentence in order to make it fit within the poem's rhyme scheme, for example in line 3: "Myself a house to buy." He makes use of end rhyme to create the poem's rhythm, observable in these abc, abc rhymed lines:

I work all day, (a)
Said Simple John, (b)
Myself a house to buy. (c)
I work all day, (a)
Said Simple John, (b)
But Pierrot wondered why. (c)

Hughes also uses parallelism, the repetition of a grammatical structure in successive lines, and cataloguing, a list, here:

For Pierrrot loved the long white road,
And Pierrot loved the moon,
And Pierrot loved a star-filled sky,

The titular character, Pierrot, is an allusion to the sad clown archetype dating from the late seventeenth century. In the American Modernist period of which Hughes was a noted voice, Pierrot often represented the alienated artist--but one capable of subversion.  In this poem, "Simple John" is the upstanding Everyman, faithful and laboring member of the bourgeoisie, while Pierrot is the romantic, artistic dreamer who abandons his own wife and steals Simple John's. The diction Hughes uses in calling Simple John a "burgher" alludes to the class to which he belongs-- and Pierrot offends.