As has been said, the stanza (_cobla_) might vary in length. No poetical literature has made more use of rime than Provençal 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.