This paper aims to highlight the destructive power of a female figure in absentiae in the landscape of the lyric I’s physical identity. Two love sonnets by Francisco de Quevedo (B485 and B486), and John Donne’s "A Nocturnall Upon St Lucies Day" are the texts in which this particular destructive force of the feminine is explored. In this light, their love poetry shows interesting affinities with their religious and occasional poetry: Donne’s Holy Sonnets and Anniversaries and Quevedo’s Heráclito Cristiano. The singular treatment of the subject’s body and its vulnerable stability in both Donne’s and Quevedo’s texts may work as a point of departure to discuss the problematic concept of subjectivity in early 17th-century poetry, and the role of the female figure in the construction of such an identity. It may also lead to reassess the significance of Petrarchan conventions in the formation of the poetic experience.