Here is the paradox and verbal trickery beloved of Baroque poets. The first four lines evoke the shadow of the poet’s lover, is it real or not, she refers to it as illusion and fiction, but the effect on the poet is real, she is dying from love. Que aunque dejas burlado el lazo estrecho Is there an actual lover, or is this all in the poet’s mind? The reader must decide … or not. The poem is about love in the shadows, perhaps real, perhaps just a fantasy. ![]() Inventiveness and playfulness were much prized and mostly carry the poems of this period rather than intensity of feeling and expression. Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, everyone’s favourite late Golden Age Mexican female poet, (ask your friends and neighbours), here writes a love sonnet in the style of the times, full of paradox and wordplay. This is the sensible reflection of the title. Her last breath must be coming soon, and her heart is giving out (such are the joys of being in love for a Baroque poet).Īnd then in the final three lines she comes to her senses, through some prodigious act of destiny and realises that nobody is as lucky in love as she. Her soul is overwhelmed with pain and suffering, such that she feels like her one life is nothing more than a thousand deaths. So the poem kicks off with the poet feeling mortally wounded by some lover’s tiff and wants nothing more than death to ease the pain. Volví a mi acuerdo y dije: ¿qué me admiro? The title, “On a sensible reflection”, describes the end point of the poet’s emotional journey, but most of the poem describes the heartache and confusion leading up to the moment of illumination. Sound and balanced advice indeed, but any lover would likely not be receptive to it until much later.īack to the late 1600s in Mexico for today’s poem from Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, It is a sonnet on the subject of the emotional disturbances of being in love, so presumably it is one of the poems that got her into trouble with her religious superiors. So there is no point in suffering as a result – all that has happened is that this love affair has reached its natural end. In the remainder of the poem, Sor Juana addresses a lover, reminding him that the course of love is always like this, with a beginning a middle and an end – so why should Alcino, the lover, be upset by this completely natural course of events? There is no blame to be attached to either Alcino or his lover, Celia. This the arc of many love affairs, and Sor Juana has described it in just eight lines. The second stanza proceeds through the cooling of passion but the awakening of jealousy, justified or unjustified, which starts to extinguish the flames of love. The first four lines succinctly describe the first three phases of a love affair – unease, caring, passion then daring and risk-taking then dependence as revealed by needy claims on the lover. ![]() So here is Sor Juana’s Advice to a Jealous Lover… ![]() ![]() The process is very like what Marcel Proust describes in the various love affairs described in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, except here, Sor Juana effectively nails the subject in a fourteen-line sonnet, whereas Proust takes a couple of thousand pages or so. This is a very satisfying, logically constructed, analytical sonnet by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, in which she dispassionately lays out the successive phases of a love affair and then uses it to console a friend who is suffering because he is in the final stages of the process in which jealousy and suspicion darkens any relationship.
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