Violante commissions a sonnet, and Lope — «never in my life have I been in such a fix» — sets about writing it… about the difficulty of writing it. The poem narrates itself line by line: «fourteen lines, they say, make a sonnet», and three are already done; now the second quatrain; now, with relief, the tercets.
When he reaches the end, the joke closes itself: «count them: if there are fourteen, it is done». It is a sonnet about making a sonnet, a pirouette of wit from the «Phoenix of Wits». It appears in his play La niña de plata (1617), spoken by a servant, and is one of the most delightful poems of the Golden Age.
The verse is kept in Spanish. Translating it in passing would replace the work with a paraphrase of it.