This sonnet has been placed first among Quevedo’s love poems since the publication of El Parnaso español in 1648, three years after his death. Although Pablo Jauralde Pou speculates that Quevedo had probably intended it to be an introductory poem – ‘como pórtico a toda su poesía amorosa’ – there is not much evidence for such a claim. For one thing, if it was envisaged as an opening poem it was more likely to have been planned by Quevedo’s first editor, José González de Salas, who observed that it was he who had been responsible for matters such as the ordering of poems, most particularly in the sub-section of the fourth section – the Musa Erato – of the 1648 edition, which comprises the poems to Lisi. But the internal evidence does not in any case suggest a prologue-poem in the manner of Petrarchan collections. Even in what have come down to us as non-sequential collections, such as the sonnets of Garcilaso and Lope de Vega, the first poem often has a note of retrospection and self-analysis in line with the opening sonnet of the Canzoniere, and no such traits are evident in Quevedo’s composition.

Nonetheless I believe that even if it is not a classic proem then it certainly impresses as an arresting opening piece. It is remarkably resonant: rich in anticipations of what is to come in this section of El Parnaso español, including the poems to Lisi.