 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”.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.