Detente, sombra de mi bien esquivo

Inundación castálida, 1689

Detente, sombra de mi bien esquivo,imagen del hechizo que más quiero,bella ilusión por quien alegre muero,dulce ficción por quien penosa vivo.

Si al imán de tus gracias, atractivo,sirve mi pecho de obediente acero,¿para qué me enamoras lisonjerosi has de burlarme luego fugitivo?

Mas blasonar no puedes, satisfecho,de que triunfa de mí tu tiranía:que aunque dejas burlado el lazo estrecho

que tu forma fantástica ceñía,poco importa burlar brazos y pechosi te labra prisión mi fantasía.

The complete sonnet, in modernised spelling per the Spanish Wikisource transcription, taken from the Inundación castálida (Madrid, 1689). No emendation was made.

Public domainThis poem is in the public domain. You may read it, copy it, recite it and publish it without asking anyone.

About the poem

This is one of Sor Juana's love sonnets, and probably the best known of them. It was printed in Inundación castálida (Madrid, 1689), the first volume of her work to reach print in her lifetime, among the pieces the old indexes described as written "at the prompting of a feeling."

The whole sonnet is a single idea carried to its end. The beloved is absent; what remains is his image — the shadow, the illusion, the fiction — and it is that image she addresses. The two quatrains ask it to stay and reproach it for seducing only to flee; the tercets turn around and deny it the victory: you can escape the embrace, but not the mind that holds you.

It is a classical sonnet, fourteen hendecasyllables in two quatrains and two tercets. The stanza moves like an argument — thesis, objection, reply — and closes on the line everyone remembers: if the body can keep no one, the imagination can. The conclusion does not console; it turns loss into a willing prison.

The verse is kept in Spanish. Translating it in passing would replace the work with a paraphrase of it.