celebrated and won, and the poetry, which unites lover and beloved”. They are generally all linked by the metaphor of procreation. Petrarch's Sonnet 9 of Canzoniere familiarizes this metaphor and foreshadows its re-emergence in Shakespeare's Sonnets 1–17 of The Sonnets. The principal structuring tool in both the English and Italian sequences is the defined division into two parts. The first part makes a concrete relationship between poet and beloved (the solid Petrarchan relationship), while the second part is shorter and brings about some sort of change in the relationship and the two members of it. In Canzoniere, this change comes in the form of Laura's death, and in The Sonnets, it occurs with Shakespeare's shift of focus from “idealizing love to sexual use”. For these two sonneteers, ending the sequence proves to be difficult in that the goal of winning the beloved is not achieved. Though normally coveted, the “open-ended structure and sequential movement of the sequence offer no logical stopping place”. Also, the fact that the second part of the sequence must act like the couplet of an individual sonnet not only creates an imbalance in the sequence, but it also puts pressure on the poet to make sure the ending has “special force”. The three main strategies that English sonneteers end up choosing from are: stopping abruptly in medias res; achieving detachment by moving into a different mode, genre, or voice; or providing a narrative resolution. Petrarch opted for the second strategy by moving into a religious mode. Shakespeare also chose the second strategy by moving into a renaissance mode, focusing on projecting his fears and desires onto Cupid. A series of complaints can also be found in the concluding sonnets of Shakespeare's sequence, which “justify the beloved’s chastity and break the identification with the poet-lover”. In both Petrarch's and Shakespeare's sequences, the indicated release—whether by death or by time—“releases the lover and the sequence abruptly shifts gears”. Ovidian influences in the sonnets Ovid's completion of the Metamorphoses ensured that, as he puts it, part of him will survive the death of his own body. The phrasing at the end of the Metamorphoses, in the account of Hercules' transfiguration upon Oeta and the likening of poetic achievement to spiritual transcendence captures some of the most extravagant claims that western culture has made for such achievement. Ovid was a uniquely important influence of Petrarch. Among the Ovidian texts to