Sonnet 30 up of fourteen lines in three quatrains and a couplet, rhyming "abab cdcd efef gg". While using the rhyming and metrical structure of the 'English' or 'Surreyan' sonnet, Shakespeare often also reflected the rhetorical form of the Italian form also known as the Petrarchan sonnet. It divides the sonnet into two parts: the "octet" (the first eight lines) usually states and develops the subject, while the "sestet" (the last six lines) winds up to a climax. Thus a change in emphasis, known as the "volta", occurs between the end of the eighth and the beginning of the ninth lines —
Curtal sonnet are translated into the last four and a half lines of a curtal sonnet. Hopkins describes the last line as half a line, though in fact it can be shorter than half of one of Hopkins's standard sprung rhythm lines. In the preface to his "Poems" (1876-89), Hopkins describes the relationship between the Petrarchan and curtal sonnets mathematically; if the Petrarchan sonnet can be described by the equation 8+6=14 then, he says, the curtal sonnet would be: Hopkins's only examples of the form are "Pied Beauty," "Peace," and "Ash Boughs." "Pied Beauty" is as follows, showing the proportional relation to