It was, by far, the most common genre used, especially by early troubadours, and only in the second half of the 13th century was its dominance challenged by a growing number of poets writing coblas esparsas.
The main body of the song occurs in the following stanzas, and usually draw out a variety of relationships with the exordium; formally, aside from the envoi(s), which are not always present, a canso is made of stanzas all having the same sequence of verses, in the sense that each verse has the same number of metrical syllables.
The sequence can be extremely simple, as in Can vei la lauzeta mover, whose stanzas consist of eight lines of eight metrical syllables each, or rather complex, as in Arnaut Daniel's "L'aur'amara",[2] whose first stanza is: L'aur amara fa'ls bruels brancutz clarzir, que'l dous'espeis'ab fuelhs, e'ls letz becx dels auzels ramencx te babs e mutz, pars e non pars, per que m'esfortz per far e dir plazers a manhs per lei qui m'a virat bas d'aut, don tem morir si l'afans no m'asoma.
When stanzas follow the same rhyming pattern but the actual sounds differ, they are called coblas alternadas (lit.
When the last rhyme word of one stanza appears in the first line of the next they are called coblas capfinidas (lit.
It takes the form of a shortened stanza, containing only a last part of the standard stanza used up to that point; a clear example is the same work by Arnaut Daniel quoted above: the (single) envoi is: Fez es l'acrotz: qu'el cor remir totz sers lieis cui dompnei, ses parsonier Arnaut, qu'en autr'albir n'esfort m'entent'a soma.