This is Santa Teresa's best-known poem and a peak of mystical lyric. The refrain says it all in three lines: «Vivo sin vivir en mí, / y de tal manera espero, / que muero porque no muero» — I live without living in myself, and I so hope that I die of not dying. The soul lives outside itself, never quite living its own life, because what it longs for is union with God — and that full union comes only with death.
Hence the paradox that runs through the eight glosses: death is here not an ending but the door to true life, and so the soul desires it. Written in the popular form of the glossed villancico, with its refrain returning again and again, the poem turns a logical contradiction — to die of not dying — into the exact centre of religious experience.
The verse is kept in Spanish. Translating it in passing would replace the work with a paraphrase of it.