In fourteen lines Sor Juana dissects a trap of the heart: she seeks the one who ungratefully leaves her and leaves the one who lovingly seeks her; she adores the one who mistreats her love and mistreats the one who adores it. Desire always runs to where it is not wanted.
The second quatrain takes it to the limit: the one who treats her well she finds a diamond — hard, cold — and she turns to diamond for the one who treats her badly. In the tercets she chooses, with a lucidity rare for her time, to be dragged by neither: she would rather «give her own will trouble» than surrender it. It is one of the freest minds of the baroque thinking itself through.
The verse is kept in Spanish. Translating it in passing would replace the work with a paraphrase of it.