“Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin' up and down again!”
— Rudyard Kipling, Boots (1903)
Context
Published in The Five Nations (1903), "Boots" is a dramatic monologue voiced by a British infantryman on a forced march during the Second Boer War. The bracketed line returns at the close of every stanza as the only thing the exhausted speaker can still see: the boots of the man ahead, rising and falling, mile after mile.
How the repetition works
The fourfold epizeuxis "Boots—boots—boots—boots" enacts the very thing it names — each repeated beat is another footfall, so the line trudges as relentlessly as the march itself. Where most epizeuxis spikes a single emotional cry, Kipling turns repetition into monotony: the word's sameness becomes the torment, the thing that drives men "mad with watchin' 'em."