Throughout the last chapter the dual character of the romances was evident: they were primarily tales but often associated with song or, indeed, performance. Just as they are the precursors of sophisticated narrative poems, so folk-songs that are not primarily narrative in nature are the forerunners of lyric poetry. It is true that much modern poetry is unrecognizable as a derivative of folk-song, overlaid as it is with successive layers of learning. Nonetheless many poets writing in Spanish in the last 500 years have sought variously to mimic and echo the characteristics of the so-called ‘poesía popular’.

‘Popular’ is what translators would call a false friend. Although for convenience we might render it by the same word in English it is more accurately understood as something like ‘of the people’ or ‘belonging to the people’. As with the romances, the earliest ‘poesía popular’ – the traditional lyric – consisted of anonymous pieces that were set down in words and music in the heyday of the cancioneros, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Although a handful are among the best-known of Spanish songs, most have come down as brief lyric poems, highly regarded by scholars for their literary quality. One of the best-known as a song purely and simply is a piece first published in the middle of the sixteenth century: