The "sincerity" or otherwise of Sor Juana's love poems no longer seems a crucial question; in the words of Octavio Paz [in Las peras del olmo, 1957]: "Poco importa que esos amores hayan sido ajenos ο propios, vividos ο sonados: ella los hizo suyos por gracia de la poesía". This should make it easier to see her work in relation to earlier seventeenth-century love poetry, and perhaps especially to that of writers like Polo de Medina and Bocángel who make a point of reproducing the kind of theoretical discussion which seems to have been common in the Academies of the time. It also enables one to do justice to her strong dramatic talent (by no means confined to her plays), by suggesting a type of experience in which imagination and intellect are continually brought to focus on the materials of real life. Nevertheless, certain problems remain: one of them is to know how seriously to take such poems—not in biographical terms, but as a way of expressing certain themes and attitudes; another, which follows from this, is to find a way of defining their relationship to other aspects of Sor Juana's writings.

Some years ago [in his Baroque Times in Old Mexico, 1959], Professor Irving A. Leonard attempted to solve the second problem by suggesting that certain of the love poems might be read allegorically. The ones he had in mind were the three consecutive sonnets on the theme of "encontradas correspondencias": "Que no me quiera Fabio, al verse amado …", "Feliciano me adora y le aborrezco …" and "Al que ingrato me deja, busco amante… ". Each of these poems turns on the same situation: the speaker loves A, who does not love her; at the same time, she is loved by B, whom she rejects. The treatment is extremely schematic: taken as a group, the poems seem to represent what Professor Elias Rivers [in Antología, 1965] has called "una 'cuestión de amor' trovadoresca", in which the poet's own feelings are perhaps not very deeply engaged. On Leonard's reading, however, they form a code which, once deciphered, can be seen to relate to a quite different situation which, for obvious reasons, could not be described directly. So A (Fabio-Feliciano) stands for the spirit of intellectual enquiry which runs counter to the demands of Sor Juana's religious vocation and Β (Silvio-Lisardo) for the love of the Church which she is unable to accept unconditionally. Unfortunately, there is no real evidence to justify such a theory; as Dario Puccini has pointed out [in Sor Juana Inès de la Cruz, 1967], there is nothing to suggest that Sor Juana's desire for knowledge affected the basic orthodoxy of her ideas, or that her moments of self-criticism ever induced her to see her difficulties in such clearcut terms. Here, once again, one is forced to dismiss the possibility of biographical interpretation; if the poems have a deeper meaning, it is hardly likely to be of this kind, and it seems better to confine one's speculations to the kind of tradition with which Sor Juana herself was familiar.

At the same time, if one attempts to read her love poems at their face value, they may appear disconcerting, especially if one tries to see them as a whole. Several of the finest, like "Si acaso, Fabio mío … " and "Detente, sombra de mi bien esquivo … " are moving and accomplished poems by any standard, and lose none of their effect when read in isolation. Others—the majority—contain a good deal of theorizing, which is not always applied to a particular situation. It is here that one might expect to find an explanation of the attitudes which are embodied in the more directly emotional poems, though, in fact, this is not always so.

This can best be illustrated by comparing two poems on the same theme, "Supuesto, discurso mío …" and "Al amor, cualquier curioso …". Like the three sonnets already mentioned, both these poems hinge on the idea of "correspondencia", that is to say, on the possibility of a mutual relationship between a pair of lovers. In the first, the problem is stated succinctly, though with a certain ambiguity:

The argumentative part of the poem begins at line 81:

All that we are told of Silvio and Fabio is that the former possesses "méritos" which, it is implied, are inferior to the latter's "perfecciones"; nor is there any suggestion that Fabio returns, or even recognizes, the speaker's love. The argument itself, though it occupies the remaining sixty lines of the poem, is clear enough. Silvio's fault is to have chosen to love the speaker: his kind of love costs him no sacrifice, and to return another person's love simply because one is loved would be a form of self-indulgence, a worshipping of one's own mirror image. In contrast to this, true love is fated, and may run contrary to mere "inclination":

The lines which begin "Ser potencia y ser objeto, / a toda razon se opone; …" support this view by an appeal to traditional logic: "To be a potentiality and at the same time the object of that potentiality would be contrary to reason, since it would be to exercise one's own operations on oneself. The object which it (i.e. the potentiality) knows is distinguished by its separateness—that is to say, by its status as an object; therefore the potentiality aims at that which is worthy to be loved, not at that which loves." And in the concluding lines, "correspondencia" is once more dismissed as alien to love's purpose:

A great deal of the effect of such a poem comes from the careful balancing of terms like "inclinación" and "destino", and from the ease with which logical commonplaces are torn from their normal context and worked into the natural flow of the verse. The same is true of 104, though here the intention is entirely theoretical, and there is no attempt to refer the argument to a specific situation. The opening statement of the theme immediately recalls the previous poem:

Yet already there is a difference: where the first poem recognized only a single form of love, the distinction is now between two kinds, neither of which is necessarily false. This distinction between irresistible love and "amor de elección" is amplified, more or less schematically, in the rest of the poem. The first is described as "amor afectivo"—passionate love. It is "más afectuoso", "más natural" and "más sensible"; it demands from the lover worship ("veneración") and "rendimiento de precisa obligación"; above all, it paralyses the will and is hostile to reason and the understanding. "Amor de eleccion", on the other hand, is rational and may extend to friendship and other natural bonds; in whatever form, it is based on the understanding, whence its superiority to the other kind: "digo que es más noble esencia / la del (amor) de conocimiento." As the title of the poem emphasizes, it is this second type of love which deserves to be reciprocated: "… amar por eleccion del arbitrio, es sólo digno de racional correspondencia".

Two qualifications need to be made if we are to grasp the full sense of the poem. In the first place, passionate love is described for the most part as a force which acts against the will of the lover, even though he may despise the object of his love. (The possibility that the lover may be helpless and at the same time consenting to his love does not arise.) In the last stanza, this is slightly modified:

This last-minute concession, however, scarcely weighs against the general tenor of the poem. The crucial thing is the rôle of the understanding, without which no love can be complete. In the second place, there is the tone which is used in judging the claims of irrational love, the dismissive wit which appears whenever the two kinds of love are contrasted:

Mas en mi ánimo altivo,
querer que estime el cuidado
de un corazón violentado,
es solicitar con veras
que agradezcan las galeras
la asistencia del forzado.

The ingenious play on the lover-galley slave metaphor could hardly be more pointed; an apparently casual stroke of humour is aimed at a whole tradition of amorous complaint with an economy quite beyond the possibilities of plain statement.

Each of these poems, then, speaks for an opposing view. They are, in fact, the two extremes of a whole series of poems which deal with the subject of "correspondencia", and which between them make up a fairly comprehensive range of possible attitudes. Comprehensive, but not, of course, coherent; this is the real point, and for some readers, one imagines, the stumbling-block. The question is, quite simply, how are we to take such poems? Are they merely examples of Sor Juana's skill in arguing both sides of a case, or is she arguing with herself in a more responsible sense, as part of a constantly shifting dialectic? Reading them as a whole, they may strike us rather as the poems for an unwritten pastoral novel; that is to say, in spite of their inconsistencies, they revolve around a limited number of central ideas which they debate from different, though related, points of view. Or, thinking of the artistic process behind the poems, one might put it another way: although their author is not necessarily committed permanently to a particular attitude, she has had at different times to imagine the circumstances in which any given one might be true. Sor Juana, of course, is not alone in this: the whole tradition of love poetry from the cancioneros onward shows similar inconsistencies which need only trouble us if we insist on relating them to direct personal experience, rather than to a developing literary convention. What Sor Juana's poems have in common is a rational framework of thought which rests on certain traditional polarities: reason-passion, as in the poems just discussed, and elsewhere soul-body and intuition-logic. These polarities are more often than not combined with more specific features of earlier love poetry, with concepts taken from Neoplatonism or the theory of courtly love, though here again it would be wrong to look for a complete exposition of any one set of ideas.

This brings us back to the original question. One need hardly insist on the dangers of devising simple equations between poems and "contemporary ideas". Where seventeenth-century poetry is concerned, this error can only be made worse by attempting to see a particular body of poems in terms of some basic unity of idea, so that any apparent exception has to be explained as a conscious retraction. As Professor Frank Kermode has said of Andrew Marvell [in The Selected Poetry of Andrew Marvell, 1967]: "(such poems) ask of the critic a respect for their relationship to traditions not invented by the poet, and not to be resolved in some generalization about his thought; his penetration and judgement must respect, in this sense, his singularity." In the case of Sor Juana, one could argue, the real unity of the poems comes from the sense of a strong personality which binds together a large number of heterogeneous elements—something in which the tone of the voice which speaks through the verse is at least as important as the biographical facts. This is hard to demonstrate in detail, though some such explanation is needed to account for the contrast between the almost line-by-line derivativeness of many of her poems and the extraordinary freshness of the whole. This is not to deny her lapses: many passages, and occasionally whole poems, strike one as overingenious or at times merely arid; her best verse succeeds, however, precisely because her imagination is able to find new patterns in traditional clusters of thought without accepting them schematically.

Allowing, then, for conflicting points of view, how comprehensive is the range of attitudes which Sor Juana presents? This is not the irrelevant question it might seem at first sight. The traditions on which she draws, though varied, are not unlimited, and it is quite possible to detect a preference for certain types of situation rather than others. It is noticeable, for example, that even in the poems which emphasize the idea of mutual love, there is little idea of what mutual love might be like. Here, one feels the pressure of that part of the courtly love tradition which equates love with suffering and postponement, or, occasionally, a suggestion of "platonic love" in the conventional meaning of the phrase. What one never finds is the sense of a relationship which, for better or for worse, involves the whole process of living. Significantly, the only social criterion which affects Sor Juana's poetry is "decorum": this is the principle which gives way in the face of passion, or, alternatively, to which one appeals as a means of evasion.

Nor is there much evidence of the characteristic Neoplatonic progression from sensual to spiritual love. Though the love of beauty is described in a number of poems, notably in those addressed to the Marquesa de la Laguna, there is no suggestion that this may lead to the contemplation of God, just as, at the other end of the scale, there is no indication that the woman's reflected beauty may be legitimately possessed. If this is so, the idea of a "scale" scarcely applies: what we have instead is a static situation which moves neither up nor down. Consider, for example, the poem which begins "Si el desamor o el enojo …". Here, the immediate occasion is annoyance ("enojo") at what appears to have been a sensual lapse. The speaker admits that her love is irresistible ("aunque no quise, te quise"), and for once this love is reciprocated. This balance, however, is threatened:

Anteros, traditionally, is the less harmful brother of Cupid; Méndez Plancarte equates him with "el amor puro ο dichoso en el sacrificio". The following stanza pursues this distinction between sensual passion and spiritual love:

Later, the two souls are imagined passing into eternity as an "unidad indivisible"; in this last part of the poem there is an obvious play on "unión" and "unidad": sexual union, as against the more permanent unity of souls. Yet this unity, however much it may transcend mere sexual attraction, remains a self-sufficient ideal: the "siempre amantes formas" are finally to achieve an openly pagan kind of immortality in which their happiness will be envied by the great lovers of antiquity.

Clearly, there is little in such a poem which could not be related, in one way or another, to earlier traditions. The condemnation of Cupid, for example, figures largely in Bembo and, by extension, in Gil Polo, whom Sor Juana had almost certainly read, and this is one of the things which set them apart from the more medieval notions of a Leon Hebreo. Yet in Bembo, this forms part of an attack on the whole idea of "fatal love" on which Sor Juana's poem is based. This is what one means when one speaks of "finding new patterns in traditional clusters of thought": as here, certain older, and originally inconsistent, ideas are fused into a new kind of unity, partly through the sheer conviction of the voice which presides over the poem. Moreover, as I have already argued, it is difficult not to see a consistency in the type of situation described. If the terms of this particular poem—the emphasis on love as a thing of the soul—lead it quickly away from the sphere of the senses, there are others which hardly rise to a spiritual level at all. These, on the whole, are the poems which speak of a love based on the acceptance of jealousy and suffering, the kind of love one associates with the older cancionero lyric. The title of one of these, "En que describe racionalmente los efectos irracionales del amor," introduces a long series of paradoxes which the reason is powerless to resolve. For the most part, these hinge on the contrast between irresistible desire and the fear of disillusionment. Yet one stanza seems to go beyond this:

"El" refers to the man with whom the speaker is in love: the lines express, with unusual directness, a shying-away from the intimacy of mutual feeling, a rejection of the final commitment which here, at least, has no justification in a superior form of love.

Such qualifications are not meant as a criticism of Sor Juana, but are simply an attempt to indicate the area in which her love poetry moves and, if possible, the kind of central situations on which it is based. One of these, as we have seen, is the notion of "correspondencia"; another, surely, is the tendency to think in terms of a spiritual love which does not appear to lead on to the love of God. This love is an "amor del entendimiento" which resides in the soul and which scorns the senses. Moreover, as is apparent from one of the poems already discussed, it can transcend differences of sex in a way which one is inclined to think characteristic of Sor Juana. As she says to the Marquesa de la Laguna:

Such statements are common in the poems addressed to friends, where there is no reason to suppose that she is acting a rôle. In poem 39 ("Señor Diego Valverde …"), she writes to a male acquaintance whose attractions are purely intellectual:

The difference between this and the language of certain love poems is very slight: if there is a "scale" in Sor Juana's love poems, it is not a "spiritual ladder" in the Neoplatonic sense, but one which runs through the varieties of "amor por elección", from spiritual love between the sexes to the natural demands of kinship. And at the back of all these possibilities is the idea of sexual neutrality which she expresses so strikingly in poem 48:("Señor, para responderos …"):

Here, certainly, it is safe to assume that Sor Juana is speaking from the standpoint of her religious vocation, though the attitude she is expressing seems almost a logical consequence of the conduct she envisages in several of the love poems. It would be tempting to draw the connection tighter, were it not for the existence of other poems which present emotional situations of some intensity. Significantly, the most serious of these relate either to absence or death, or, in the one notable exception, to the failure of the loved one to return the speaker's love. In poem 78 ("Agora que conmigo …"), the woman is lamenting the death of her "esposo": though she calls on love to overcome her reason, there is no attempt to convey the quality of the relationship on which it was based. Poem 76 ("Si acaso, Fabio mío …") is a different matter: in many ways this is the finest, and certainly the most moving, of Sor Juana's love poems, not merely because of the situation itself. This is exceptional enough (the woman who speaks is dying in the arms of her lover), yet the most striking thing is the complete absence of rhetoric and the effect of tenderness which this creates. This is not merely a question of restraint or the avoidance of sentimentality: the boldness of a metaphor like "De tu rostro en el mío / haz, amoroso, estampa" and a phrase like "Unidas de las manos / las bien tejidas palmas" are more physical than anything else in Sor Juana's poems. But what controls these details is the same voice which can contemplate death as an "eternal night" and, a moment later, can move wittily through a series of legal metaphors which issue with sudden appropriateness in the image of a pagan underworld:

It would be difficult to deny the sense of intimacy; yet one suspects that such a mood has been achieved precisely because of the imminence of death. At one point in the poem, the speaker says:

… dame el postrer abrazo
cuyas tiernas lazadas,
siendo unión de los cuerpos,
identiflcan almas.

This may recall one of the poems discussed earlier, in which the unity of souls was directly opposed to the idea of physical union. Here, there is no such opposition, but rather a telescoping of the two states, so that one is indistinguishable from the other. It would be wrong, of course, to expect complete consistency between the two poems; at the same time, the terms in which Sor Juana speaks of the love of the soul scarcely vary. In this particular poem, there is a sense in which the physical union, such as it is, achieves a dignity which it is not allowed elsewhere simply because of the unrepeatable nature of the situation, as if the urgency of the request guaranteed the merging of body and soul.

These invented situations lead one to reflect on the part played by the imagination in Sor Juana's work. This is not merely a question of invention, but also, in certain poems, a possible means of dominating the experiences which she presents. One cannot fail to notice, for instance, how many of her love poems are concerned with absence. A relatively trivial example of this occurs in the poem which begins "Aunque cegué de mirarte …" where the male speaker claims that the woman he loves, though physically absent, is present—and more powerfully so—to the "eyes of the soul". Though in this particular poem the idea is hardly more than a conventional hyperbole, it is the emphasis itself which strikes one: the notion that "gustos imaginados" are actually superior to those which are literally experienced. One sees the significance of this when one turns to a much finer poem, the sonnet which begins "Detente, sombra de mi bien esquivo …". As Carlos Blanco Aguinaga explains in his excellent analysis of this poem [in MLN, 1962], its whole strategy consists in deceiving the expectations aroused in the opening quatrains. Just at the moment when it seems likely that the shadow of the elusive lover will finally escape her, the speaker quietly announces her victory:

Absence here has become crucial: it is no longer a temporary condition, as in the previous poem, though neither is it the total absence of death. Quite simply, it is a state which, because of the power of the imagination, has ceased to be a deprivation at all; the only state, moreover, in which the imagination is at liberty to exercise its powers to the full. It seems doubtful whether the attitude of this poem is as unique as Blanco Aguinaga suggests; there is, in fact a whole group of poems which tend in the same direction, though none of them achieves such a complete expression as this one. At this level, certainly, it hardly seems to matter whether the situation is invented or not: without exception, the men and women of Sor Juana's love poems are "shadows" evolved by the imagination. As Ramón Xirau has observed [in Genio y figura de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 1967]: "sucede como si Sor Juana quisiera alejar el objeto amoroso para mejor amasarlo; como si quisiera guardarlo en el recuerdo para mejor poseerlo en las imágenes de la memoria." Hence the importance, not only of absence, but of all the other devices and arguments by which her poems elude the tensions of a living relationship. In all the situations she presents, there are two ways of dominating experience, one intellectual, the other emotional, though the second is never entirely divorced from the first. As many critics have pointed out, her mind habitually works in terms of traditional dualities. Her intellect is such that it can argue for opposing points of view; it is emotionally, through her imagination, that she comes closest to achieving a synthesis of contraries, a precarious undertaking which can only succeed in the face of rational impossibility and which, when it fails, plunges straight into disillusionment.

One might end there, were it not that the subject of human love also occurs in Sor Juana's religious poems. In divine love, predictably, all contraries are resolved: "Que amor que se tiene en Dios / es calidad sin opuestos". In Sor Juana's presentation of divine love, therefore, there are none of the contradictory attitudes one finds in her poems on secular love. What problems there are come from a different source: roughly speaking, there are tensions involved in achieving divine love, and these come from the weaknesses of human nature, and particularly from the tendency of the attitudes of human love to in tervene. Hardly surprisingly, therefore, several of the religious poems contain contrasts, open or implied, with human love, and these are all the sharper for being expressed in a common terminology.

Once again, the key concept is "correspondencia", which not only appears in several of Sor Juana's religious poems, but is also vital to the argument of the Carta atenagórica, her famous reply to the Portuguese Jesuit, Padre Antonio Vieira. The latter, in his Sermão do Mandato of 1650, had argued that the greatest sign of Christ's love for humanity was neither the Eucharist nor his death on the Cross, but his willingness to absent himself from man while at the same time loving him more than his own life. Moreover, he went on to say, Christ had not wished his love to be returned for his own sake, but for that of man, and that consequently his greatest act of favour ("fineza") was to love without "correspondence". Sor Juana attacks both arguments: her own view, basically, is that the full extent of Christ's love for man is shown by his actual death, and that, in dying, "quiso mucha correspondencia, y no la renunció, sino que la solicitó". We do not need to follow the rest of her reasoning; in the present context, what is interesting is the confrontation between two kinds of relationship. As she says at one point: "el no querer correspondencia fuera fineza en un amor humano, porque fuera desinterés; pero en el de Cristo no lo fuera, porque no tiene interés ninguno en nuestra correspondencia … El amor humano halla en ser correspondido, algo que le faltara si no lo fuera, como el deleite, la utilidad, el aplauso, etc. Pero al de Cristo nada le falta aunque no le correspondamos … (Mi proposición) es que Cristo quiso la correspondencia para sí, pero la utilidad que resulta de esa correspondencia la quiso para los hombres": At this distance in time, the actual theological point may seem overingenious; remembering her poems, however, it is surely revealing that, where human love is concerned, Sor Juana allows for two opposing views and then goes on to argue that the love of Christ is unlike either.

In poem 56 ("Traigo conmigo un cuidado …"), she speaks of the difficulties of achieving disinterestedness in a divine context. On the face of it, she has rejected all kinds of human love—"amor bastardo, … de contrarios compuesto"—in favour of the one legitimate love, that of God. The problem arises when her spiritual desires become overlaid with human expectations; her suffering comes about because she wishes God to return her love, though she regards this as a human weakness. In one sense, of course, it is not: there is nothing in the least unorthodox about wishing to receive divine grace. However, as Méndez Plancarte points out, the kind of disinterestedness Sor Juana has in mind belongs to the tradition of "No me mueve, mi Dios, para quererte …", though her own poem, by comparison, is lacking in conviction. Instead, there is division:

Méndez Plancarte slightly misinterprets these lines: the speaker's "dolor de amor" is not "el anhelo de la absoluta seguridad de su correspondencia", but her grief at not being able to rise above the desire for "correspondence". It would be a mistake to suppose that she were denying the existence of God's love for man: in view of the earlier lines in which human love is rejected, it seems that what she really fears is that the purity of her love for God will be harmed by an excessively human idea of "correspondence".

Despite the possible echoes of Santa Teresa, there is nothing especially "mystical" about this poem or the two which follow. In "Mientras la Gracia me excita … ", the suffering lies more vaguely in the conflict between reason and "la costumbre", though the final paradox—

—suggests that the suffering caused by guilt may not itself be guilty; that it may, in fact, be a source of good. Here, as in all Sor Juana's writings, divine love is equated with reason and virtue, never with less rational qualities; unreason, on the other hand, is part of the normal fabric of human life, just as it belongs to a certain kind of secular love. And in "Amante dulce del alma … ", the last of the group, the distance between the human and the divine is once more asserted through a variation on a familiar strategem.

Several of Sor Juana's poems on human love describe the effects of jealousy. In one of them, "Si es amor causa productiva … ", it is taken to be the one infallible sign of love: "Sólo los celos ignoran / fábricas de fingimientos… ". Conversely, Christ's love for man is disinterested, though in order to bring this home in her poem, she momentarily entertains the idea that it might be no more than jealousy. The speaker has just taken Communion: Christ has now "entered her heart", and she asks:

For a moment we are made to think of the human world, in which a man may examine a woman's appearance or conduct for signs of infidelity. But immediately she pulls herself up with a sense of shock: nothing, after all, is hidden from Christ—"¡ … como si el estorbo humano / obstara al Lince Divino!"—implying, perhaps, that jealousy exists precisely because human beings do not have the power of seeing into one another's souls. So she moves to her conclusion: since the circumstances for jealousy are lacking, Christ's presence in her heart must be a sign of love:

The poem not only confirms the unique nature of divine love by deliberately inviting human comparisons; it also presents the relationship between Christ and the believer in a way which seems characteristic of its author. At such moments, as Ramón Xirau has observed, "más que ver, Sor Juana siente que es vista". The contemplation of God, in the strict sense of the term, seldom enters her work, even as an ideal. What one finds instead, of course, is the constant humility of someone for whom divine favours are granted without regard to merit and for whom any thought of a more direct relationship with God would seem arrogant. And this may lead us to reflect once again on the love poems: if this is Sor Juana's view of her relations with God, is it surprising that her poems should avoid the idea that, through human love, one may rise to the contemplation of divinity?

One might be tempted to argue that there are inconsistencies in her religious poems as well. However, this would be to ignore the two traditional ways of approach to God, the negative and the affirmative, which are complementary, rather than mutually exclusive. God, in Sor Juana's poems, may be present or absent, yet his absence is never final. As she says in the Carta atenagórica, "No ver lo que da gusto es dolor; pero mayor dolor es ver lo que da disgusto", a remark which has its implications for both human and divine love. In both cases, absence is a time for reflection as well as suffering and, where God is concerned, deprivation is only another stimulus to love.

In all Sor Juana's religious writing, there is one major theme: divine love is rational, consequently there can be no direct, intuitive knowledge of God. This is why, in her sacred poems, the idea of divine love is continually approached through comparisons with human love, which is partly known, though limited by various kinds of convention. In the end, the contradictions of the love poems seem to indicate—how consciously, one cannot say—that such partial knowledge is the most one can hope to achieve. What matters for Sor Juana is not so much knowledge as the search for knowledge, though this can best be seen in the one major poem which lies outside this study. As Octavio Paz has said: " Primero sueño no es el poema del conocimiento, sino del acto de conocer." Explicitly or implicitly, Sor Juana's treatment of love confirms this with a richness of attitudes that is often tested by the intellect, but which has little to do with intellectual certainties.