These sonnets tend to state and develop a conflict in the first and second quatrains and then solve it using the sestet. Donne however concocted his own form, not using the fourteen line, iambic pentameter model as the root of all sonnets. However he did use it when he wrote his nineteen Holy Sonnets. For example, Holy Sonnet ten uses the regular Italian sonnet pattern with iambic pentameter. "Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you [ ] (Donne, 10, I)." This is unlike the Shakespearean sonnet that typically took on a different rhyming scheme.
Shakespeare's sonnets were usually three quatrains and a couplet, typical of the Elizabethan structure. Each quatrain would complicate the situation and advance the plot, then it is resolved using the couplet. The form for such sonnets was abab cdcd efef gg. "In many ways, Shakespeare's use of the sonnet form is richer and more complex than this relatively simple division into parts might imply" (Spark Notes, Shakespeare). Shakespeare also strayed from the norm and satirized the Petrarchan blazon. These were hyperbolic praises about an ideal woman, which were often stated by listing her qualities. Sonnet 130 is the exact opposite and rather than putting his mistress up on a pedestal, Shakespeare lowers her to human standards. He loves her because she is not fake or stretching to fit societies ideals. "And in some perfume is there more delight / Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks (Shakespeare 130, vii-viii)." "Sonnet 130 mocks the typical Petrarchan metaphors by presenting a speaker who seems to take them at face value, and somewhat bemusedly, decides to tell the truth" (Spark Notes, Shakespeare 130). .
"The rhetorical structure of Sonnet 130 is important to its effect. In the first quatrain, the speaker spends one line on each comparison between his mistress and something else (the sun, coral, snow, and wires--the one positive thing in the whole poem some part of his mistress is like.