This essay reads one of Quevedo’s love sonnets discussing traditional interpretations, but taking into a particular consideration the extraordinary symmetry of its development. In the Petrarchan tradition, this sonnet results in an important variant: there are not love’s labours but aggression and defeat. The analysis explores Quevedo’s rich elaboration of different semantic areas: from the psychological one to the religious one to the civil one, and concludes underlining the triumph of a baroque game in which, out of tradition, there is not death for love. The killer is not Love but Beauty.

Quevedo from Petrarchism to Baroque through structures and semantic areas.