SOURCE: "Time and Space in Sor Juana's El sueño," in Hispanic Journal, Vol. 13, No. 2, Fall, 1992, pp. 345-52.

In the following essay, Nanfito examines Cruz's treatment of time and space in her most famous poem.

If Renaissance poetry tended toward simplicity in its use of tense and time reference, the baroque poem exhibits an explicit, accentuated awareness of the passage and multivalent nature of time, and an unparalleled inclination toward the manipulation of time and the exploitation of its paradoxes. The existing union between life and death in the essence of all living creatures, along with the notion of time as an inexorable agent, constitute some of the central themes or motives recurring throughout the Hispanic Baroque, particularly in the "metaphysical poetry" characteristic of this period, distinguished by its emphatic and impassioned inclination toward ingenuity and obscurity.

The question of time recurs in the literary texts of the...