Cobla Esparsa

A cobla esparsa, literally a scattered stanza in Old Occitan, is the name used for a single stanza poem in troubadour poetry. Such stanzas make up about fifteen percent of the surviving troubadour output, and they are the dominant form among later troubadours, after 1220, such as Bertran Carbonel and Guillem de l'Olivier. Modern scholars use the term cobla triada for a stanza taken from a longer poem and left to stand on its own, though the term's original medieval meaning was a cobla esparsa drawn from a larger collection of such stanzas, since they were usually presented in large groupings. Sometimes two poets would each write a cobla esparsa in an exchange, a shorter counterpart to the tenso or partimen, and scholars still debate whether such an exchange should be treated as its own genre, as a short tenso, or simply as a pair of coblas esparsas.