In a poem, irregular indentation of some lines

  • Unknown's avatar
    badgerkin · Member ·

    So far am in Draft of post; the whole paragraph is margined at 100 px (to center it on page).
    Example: The lines in italics (below) are supposed to be indented about 5 spaces:

    Breathers of wisdom won without a quest,
    Quaint uncouth dreamers, voices high and strange;
    Flutists of lands where beauty hath no change,
    And wintry grief is a forgotten guest,

  • fstat · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    What’s the title of that draft post so I can have a look?

  • Unknown's avatar
    badgerkin · Member ·

    Hi fstat, thanks; it’s called:

    “The Frogs” / Lampman

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    This is on https://wordverseuniverse.wordpress.com, correct?

    I don’t see any irregular indentation on that post. Every second stanza of the poem is indented, but all lines in those stanzas are indented exactly the same for me.

    Can you take a screen shot of what you see for me? Upload it to your media library at My Site ->Site ->Media, and I’ll be able to view it there.

  • Unknown's avatar
    badgerkin · Member ·

    I see precisely what you see, fstat, and that is precisely my issue :)
    I cannot do the indents!
    I seem to recall that once I was able to accomplish a required indent by a process wherein: each time an indented line was to follow a non-indented line, I would need to make separate paragraphs and in the preceding paragraph I would have to stipulate the the bottom margin of this ‘paragraph’ was to be 0 px.
    I can probably find this in my records…but since this particular poem has these indentations often, I was hoping there might be a shortcut of some sort.

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    @badgerkin I’m looking at the code you have, and it’s set up to indent every other stanza but not the lines you mentioned.

    Did you want it to look like this?

    Breathers of wisdom won without a quest,
     Quaint uncouth dreamers, voices high and strange;
     Flutists of lands where beauty hath no change,
And wintry grief is a forgotten guest,

    I’d recommend using the PRE tag or the poetry block for that personally. We recommended that here too:
    https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/html-css-for-hanging-indent-poetry/

    But if you want to use some other html, perhaps spaces like this would do?

        Quaint uncouth dreamers, voices high and strange;

    You might also like the Poetry block in the block editor.

  • Unknown's avatar
    badgerkin · Member ·

    Wow, supernovia, I will definitely try the   (I’ve always wondered what the heck that is) (I don’t know way more than I do know of html…a dangerous thing, right?).
    Yeah, I don’t really like those blocks with the boundary around them, the words seem a step further removed, like yet another ‘screen’…I will try the html and let you know, give me a few hours to get to it!
    Thanks!

  • Unknown's avatar
    badgerkin · Member ·

    Done!! It works beautifully!
    (Post still in draft, but soon will publish.)
    Thank-you, supernovia, very much.
    :)

  • The topic ‘In a poem, irregular indentation of some lines’ is closed to new replies.