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 —
Sonnet 26 composed in iambic pentameter, a type of poetic metre based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions per line. The seventh line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter line. The next contains a final extrametrical syllable or "feminine ending", of which this sonnet has six; it also exhibits an ictus moved to the right (resulting in a four-position figure, codice_1, sometimes referred to as a "minor ionic"): As Stephen Booth notes, Sonnet 26 works on a series of "shows": the word appears in four separate lines of the sonnet. Booth perceives a vague sexual pun in the second half of