Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus

En que da moral censura a una rosa, y en ella a sus semejantes:

Divine rose, in your gracious and tender blossom,
You are with your most fragrant subtleties,
Bestower of enroyalled instructions on beauty
Pure as the snow, you teach of loveliness.

Likeness of human form and structure,
Exemplar of all the vain gentility
Wherein nature is to be found uniting
Both the happy cradle and the lamented grave.

What loftiness there is in your presumption!
And prideful scorn at the mere hint of death’s suggestion.
Yet no sooner than you shrink back in consternation

Of that incipient state, with fainting and withered innuendo,
Of your erudite death and fatuous life, than you signal
You lived deceiving, but in your death enlighten!

Juana Inés de la Cruz.