Many readers have paid tribute to the freshness and charm of the cantiga de amigo. Few have responded in the same way to the cantiga de amor. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos set the tone for most later discussions by asserting in her edition of the Cancioneiro da Ajuda that “As cantigas de amor […] são de enorme monotonia, pobreza e convencionalismo, quanto às ideias, às expressões e às formas métricas” (II, 598). Nearly a hundred years later, Jensen similarly declares that “With little inclination for innovation, the Galician-Portuguese poets follow their Provençal models very closely. The cantigas are conventional, thematically repetitious, tending to produce a certain impression of monotony” (xxviii–xxix). But if the cantiga de amor follows its models so closely, why does the troubadour canso fail to produce a similar “impression of monotony”? I shall try to answer this question by examining several cantigas de amor and then comparing them with a troubadour canso. I begin with a work by King Dinis (B 520/V 113; Roberts 169), whose 73 songs account for more than one in ten of the cantigas de amor preserved in the cancioneiros. I normalize the spelling and occasionally modify the punctuation of the edition cited.