María de Zayas's dynamic use of intercalated poetry in her Novelas amorosas y ejemplares (1637) and Parte segunda del Sarao y entretenimiento honesto (1647) provides us with a sustained example of ‘poetry in motion’ across hundreds of narrative pages. Over the course of these works, Zayas intersperses lyric forms in her narrative, creating generic contrasts that are integral to the structure of both books and offering evidence for the gradual transformation of her central character, Lisis.

As readers progress through the frame that enfolds and interconnects the twenty novellas of Zayas's two books, they follow the thread of the story of Lisis, the frame narrative's protagonist and, as some critics have suggested, Zayas's alter ego. Lisis first appears at the opening of the Novelas amorosas as a poet, weakened in body and mind because Don Juan has spurned her. As the sarao begins she is lying on her couch, sickened by the sort of early modern ‘amorous jealousy’ Steven Wagschal has defined as ‘a group of emotions, feelings, thoughts, bodily changes, and attitudes that are experienced in relation to guarding the exclusivity of a relationship that one possesses from a rival and/or avenging the loss of that which was possessed’. Through the course of the works as a whole, Lisis makes a systematic conversion from poet to narrator as well as from illness to health. She undergoes these changes in her mental and physical state as she overcomes Don Juan's rejection.