This is the sonnet that closes Prosas profanas (1896), and it is a poem about the impossibility of writing the perfect poem. «Yo persigo una forma que no encuentra mi estilo» — I pursue a form my style cannot find: the bud of thought that would be a rose, the impossible embrace of the Venus de Milo, an ideal that offers itself and will not be reached.
The master of form confesses here that form slips away from him. The poem ends without closing, on a question mark — «the neck of the great white swan that questions me» — leaving the search open. It is the lucid reverse of modernista virtuosity: to know that what one pursues always stays a little beyond.
The verse is kept in Spanish. Translating it in passing would replace the work with a paraphrase of it.