Romeo and Juliet contains several sonnets, a traditional form of poetry comprised of fourteen rhyming lines, usually about love. Shakespeare himself wrote sonnets, as did most of the major poets of his day. Shakespeare uses the language of Petrarch's sonnets to show Romeo's growing maturity as a lover. Shakespeare's sonnets are composed of 14 lines, and most are divided into three quatrains and a final, concluding couplet, rhyming. Many later Renaissance English writers used this sonnet form, and Shakespeare did so particularly inventively. His sonnets vary its configurations and effects repeatedly
