Four lines, and one of the most remembered declarations of love in the language. Bécquer keeps raising the stakes: for a look he would give a world, for a smile a whole heaven; and coming to the kiss, he is left without measure and without words: «yo no sé / qué te diera por un beso» — I do not know what I would give you for a kiss.
The whole poem is built for that final hesitation. Against what he can price — a world, a heaven — the kiss falls outside all reckoning: there is nothing great enough to offer. In its brevity of a folk couplet, Rima XXIII sums up Bécquer's poetics of love, made of much feeling and very few words.
The verse is kept in Spanish. Translating it in passing would replace the work with a paraphrase of it.