To synthesise my thoughts and offer conclusions regarding Aldana's love poetry, I present a critical reading of the poem ‘Entre el Asia y Europa es repartido’, which brings together the various facets explored in the preceding chapters. The poem is a gloss of Garcilaso de la Vega's well-known sonnet ‘Pasando el mar Leandro el animoso’, first published in 1543 as part of the fourth book of Las obras de Boscán y algunas de Garcilaso de la Vega. Aldana's poem differs insofar as the form is concerned, since it is written in octaves, and incorporates a line of Garcilaso's poem at the end of each strophe. As was also the situation for the philosophical fragments considered in the opening chapter of this study, the poem was published in an incomplete state and lacked lines 6–7 of Garcilaso's original, signalling a total of two missing strophes. This fact was made clear to readers unfamiliar with Garcilaso's original sonnet via the addition of ‘de la qual faltan dos octauas’ to the title of the piece in Cosme's edited volume. A recent study would appear to have found a version of the missing content in a manuscript held at the Biblioteca Nacional de España, although the scholar notes that it is ‘representiva de un estudio redaccional primitivo’. As the incomplete version served as the basis for the majority of contemporary readers’ interactions with the poem, and bearing in mind the early draft nature of the two missing stanzas, I have chosen to engage with the poem in its incomplete form for the purposes of this analysis.

The myth of Hero and Leander had become popular owing to the fifteenth-century printing of Musaeus’ poem, the lasting legacy of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the poetry that followed in the Early Modern period across Europe. The myth tells the story of two young lovers separated by the Hellespont, a narrow stretch of sea between the continents of Europe and Asia Minor. On the European shore was Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite, while on the other was Leander, a young man from Abydos, who would visit her from Asia Minor on a nightly basis. Hero would light a lamp to help guide the youth as he swam to her in the darkness.