The topic comes from one of the poems that Lorca composed during the summers in the house in Valderrubio and that make up his initial Libro de poemas (Book of Poems), edited later, in 1921. The young Lorca felt a predilection for poems of a pantheistic tone starring animals under the direct influence of Rubén Darío (see the poem Los motivos del Lobo (The Wolf Motives)). Many of those little fables were excluded from the final selection, although some survived thanks to the efforts of Mora Guarnido and the editor Gabriel García Maroto, such as Los encuentros de un caracol aventurero (The Encounters of an Adventurous Snail). Among the discarded and lost poems was one that referred to the “minimal adventure” of a butterfly with a broken wing that falls into a nest of cockroaches. The cockroaches take her in and heal her. When she recovers her strength, she makes a pirouette in the air and leaves the son of a cockroach, who had fallen madly in love with her, desolate. Federico used to graciously recite those poems that later, in print, lost part of their charm.