The Poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
The poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a prominent figure in 17th-century Mexico, showcases her remarkable proficiency across various poetic forms, including pastoral poems, sonnets, and religious verses. Renowned for her intellectual depth, her work employs intricate poetic devices like paradox and allusion, reflecting the baroque style of the time. Unique among her contemporaries, Sor Juana's poetry addresses themes of gender equality and the importance of education for women. Her love poetry often conveys deep intellectual insights, merging traditional sentiments with feminist declarations. For instance, she challenges societal norms regarding love and relationships, asserting a woman's agency in choosing her path. In her religious works, she integrates intellectual metaphors to advocate for women's roles within the church, emphasizing their rational capabilities. One of her notable pieces, "First Dream," explores philosophical concepts of knowledge and existence, illustrating her quest for understanding amidst the limits of human comprehension. Overall, Sor Juana's poetry not only resonates with personal emotion but also serves as a powerful commentary on the intellectual and social status of women in her era.
The Poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
First published:Inundación castálida, 1689
The Work
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was known throughout seventeenth century Mexico and Spain for her skill in almost all forms of baroque poetry: pastoral poems, sonnets, love poems, romances, religious poetry in several traditional forms, portrait poetry, and drama. In poetry written mostly for religious and civil ceremonies, she cleverly displays the customary poetic devices of the age—parallelism, oxymoron, paradox, mythological allusion (even in her religious poetry), and metaphors drawn from physics, mathematics, and music. A birthday poem states: “Let your age, my lord, so greatly exceed/ The capacity embraced by zero/ That the ars combinatoria of Kircher/ Are unable to multiply its quantity.” Even her love poetry is intellectual and expressed in careful, mannered, and elegant language. A love poem begins: “Halt, reflection of my elusive love,/ Image of the charm I most adore,/ Lovely illusion for whom I gaily die,/ Sweet fiction for whom I sadly live.”
What sets her poetry apart from all other of the time is her theme: the equality of women and their right to an education and an intellectual life. A love poem that begins in a very traditional way: “Feliciano adores me, and I abhor him;/ Lisardo abhors me, and I adore him” ends with a surprisingly feminist declaration: “But I, as the better alternative, choose/ To serve him whom I don’t love, against my will/ Rather than be, of him who doesn’t love me, the despised victim.”
Even in her religious poetry, Sor Juana employs intellectual metaphors and declares a feminist theme. A poem dedicated to Saint Catherine, a martyr of the church, declares: “By a woman they are convinced,/ All the sages of Egypt,/ By her proof that sex/ Is not the essence of sense . . . / She studies, argues, and teaches/ And is of service to the Church,/ For God doesn’t want her to be ignorant/ Since He made her a rational being.” Sor Juana’s insistence on an intellectual and rational view of life, divorced from emotional and sexual bias, shapes her long poem First Dream. In this philosophical discourse, the soul, after the body has fallen asleep, attempts to grasp creation intuitively. Failing this, it tries again, using Aristotle’s dialectical method, moving from the simple to the more complex. Failing again, the soul admits the impossibility of complete comprehension of the universe, but in its failure recognizes the value of intellectual effort in giving meaning to life, as Sor Juana herself recognized.
Bibliography
Cohen, J. M. The Penguin Book of Spanish Verse. New York: Penguin, 1956.
Flynn, Gerard. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. New York: Twayne, 1971.
Paz, Octavio. Sor Juana: Or, The Traps of Faith. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.