«When I pause to contemplate my state» and look at the road that has brought me here, Garcilaso says, I find I might have come to a greater ill still. The sonnet is a reckoning of the soul: the poet looks back and sees himself lost, and yet grants that his harm could have been worse.
He knows he is ending, given over defenceless to one who will know how to undo him «if she so wishes». It is the first of his sonnets, and the essential Garcilaso is already whole: the lover's complaint turned inward, in the hendecasyllable he brought into Castilian from Italy.
The verse is kept in Spanish. Translating it in passing would replace the work with a paraphrase of it.