These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
A spatial caesura accomplished entirely with CSS in Internet Explorer. Unfortunately it does not work at all in Netscape. Compare this with the Bartleby.com version, which is transmitted typewriter style and awkwardly presented within <pre> tags. Home
A modification by Micah Sittig, places the caesura on a newline and assures proper line spacing with two line breaks and a non-breaking space. Works on both IE and Mozilla.
Eric Meyer responded, and recommended losing the <br />, and using .caesura { vertical-align: -20px; }, where 20px is the line height. Very cool solution, very standards compliant, works in Mozilla. Unfortunately it does not work in IE5.0/Win, which often has problems with vertical alignment.
Mr. Piggin wrote back suggesting that every line should be encased in a <p> tag, with a very convincing argument given on his poetry site. Micah Sittig interpreted the paragraph tag as having been named in a prose context, such that if it was called the "line" tag it would be appropriate for marking up poetry. With XML it should be possible to define one's own tag for this purpose.
Update (Aug 2002): The XHTML 2.0 working draft is out. Guess what new tag has been added? That's right, <line></line> ! And given that IE 5/Win cannot handle XHTML 2.0 at all, this is good news for Eric's solution, which may be practical sooner than we think.
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