The second stanza proceeds through the cooling of passion but the awakening of jealousy, justified or unjustified, which starts to extinguish the flames of love. The first four lines succinctly describe the first three phases of a love affair – unease, caring, passion then daring and risk-taking then dependence as revealed by needy claims on the lover. So here is Sor Juana’s Advice to a Jealous Lover… The process is very like what Marcel Proust describes in the various love affairs described in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, except here, Sor Juana effectively nails the subject in a fourteen-line sonnet, whereas Proust takes a couple of thousand pages or so.
This is a very satisfying, logically constructed, analytical sonnet by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, in which she dispassionately lays out the successive phases of a love affair and then uses it to console a friend who is suffering because he is in the final stages of the process in which jealousy and suspicion darkens any relationship.
