SOURCE: "Music Box," in Sor Juana or, the Traps of Faith, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, Belknap Press, 1988, pp. 307-25.

In the following essay, Paz traces the development of the villancico and surveys Cruz's poems in this genre.

Poetic forms are like plants: some are native to the soil they grow in and others are the result of grafting and transplanting. The sonnet and terza rima are Spanish by naturalization, the romance and villancico by birth. The last of these, according to a noted specialist in metrics, Tomás, Navarro Tomás, comes from Galician-Portuguese cantigas de estribillo, which derived from the Mozarabic zéjel. From the medieval period to the twentieth century, the poetic fortune of the villancico has been extraordinary.

In the fifteenth century the villancico split away from the cantigas de estribillo to acquire its own form. Despite changes over the centuries, the form has...