What poetic devices does Johnson Agard use in "The Clown's Wife"?

Besides its imagery, the most obvious poetic devices in this poem are irony and paradox.  While the clown is the "king on the throne" (4) with a silly "red nose" (7) whose job it is to make his audience laugh, the wife assumes that same role when her husband gets home. The poem makes the statement that a person who works so hard at making others happy may have a more difficult time making himself happy. The paradox here is that making the lives of the general population better has a negative effect on the actual life of the individual performer. Perhaps this is true because the performer truly understands that he is only presenting a type of facade rather than reality.

The speaker, the wife, reveals the clown's melancholic personality when she notes that "I do me best to cheer him up, poor soul"(9).  She worries that he buries his emotions inside, the opposite tendencies of a clown.  The poet uses images to reveal the antics of a clown, but humorously uses them to describe not the clown himself, but the wife. In stanza four, she juggles, jokes and performs physical stunts to do, in effect, the same job her husband does during the day. Her understanding of his predicament lends to her characterization as a truly devoted wife.  The husband appreciates his wife's efforts in the last lines, 16 and 17, of the poem:  O life, ah life, what would I do without this clown of a wife?"

The reader understand the images portrayed by a typical street clown, but is more affected by the irony and paradox of the actual life of a clown.  All is not fun and games in real life; even a clown knows that.