own at the troubadour period.

As has been said, the stanza (_cobla_) might vary in length. No poetical
literature has made more use of rime than Provencal lyric poetry. There
were three typical methods of rime disposition: firstly, the rimes might
all find their answer within the stanza, which was thus a self-contained
whole; secondly, the rimes might find their answer within the stanza and
be again repeated in the same order in all following stanzas; and
thirdly, the rimes might find no answer within the stanza, but be
repeated in following stanzas. In this case the rimes were known as
_dissolutas_, and the stanza as a _cobla estrampa_. This last
arrangement tended to make the poem a more organic whole than was
possible in the first two cases; in these, stanzas might be omitted
without necessarily impairing the general effect, but, when _coblas
estrampas_ were employed, the ear of the auditor, attentive for the [30]
answering rimes, would not be satisfied before the conclusion of the
second stanza. A further step towards the provision of closer unity
between the separate stanzas was the _chanso redonda_, which was
composed of _coblas estrampas_, the rime order of the second stanza
being an inversion of the rime order of the first; the tendency reaches
its highest point in the _sestina_, which retained the characteristic of
the _chanso redonda_, namely, that the last rime of one stanza should
correspond with the first rime of the following stanza, but with the
additional improvement that every rime started a stanza in turn,
whereas, in the _chanso redonda_ the same rime continually recurred at
the beginning of every other stanza.

Reference has already been made to the _chanso_. A poetical form of much
importance was the _sirventes_, which outwardly was indistinguishable
from the _chanso_. The meaning of the term is unknown; some say that it
originally implied a poem composed by "servants," poets in the service
of an overlord; others, that it was a poem composed to the tune of a [31]
_chanso_ which it thus imitated in a "servile" manner. From the _chanso_
the _sirventes_ is distinguished by its subject matter; it was the
vehicle for satire, moral reproof or political lampooning. The
troubadours were often keenly interested in the political events of
their time; they filled, to some extent, the place of the modern
journalist and were naturally the partisans of the overlord in whose
service or pay they happened