Explore "This Thing You See" by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
In which she attempts to refute the praises of a portrait of the poet, signed by truth, which she calls passion
This thing you see, a bright-colored deceit, / displaying all the many charms of art, / with false syllogisms of tint and hue / is a cunning deception of the eye;
this thing in which sheer flattery has tried / to evade the stark horrors of the years / and, vanquishing the cruelties of time, / to triumph over age and oblivion, / is vanity, contrivance, artifice, / a delicate blossom stranded in the wind, / a failed defense against our common fate;
a fruitless enterprise, a great mistake, / a decrepit frenzy, and rightly viewed, / a corpse, some dust, a shadow, mere nothingness.