Why?

Typography

In regular text, there are two different meaning of a new line: a break between two paragraphs, and the word wrap.

When rendering poetry, we need a third one: the carriage return between two verse lines. This one should be different from the word wrap carriage return, otherwise one will not be able to tell apart these two (generally, wrapped text is indented, whereas verse lines are not).

Markdown

One could use carriage return (two white spaces at the end of a line) between verse lines, and paragraph break between stanzas, but:

adding white spaces at the end of lines is painful;
there is no easy way to render chorus (in a different way from verses).

Directive

The poetry directive takes only one argument content, containing the poetry to render. Carriage returns are respected.

Chorus are lines with > as a starting character.

Lines starting with ) are consored/outdated/crossed out verses.

View example

[[!poetry  content="""
This is a verse
Made of several lines

> And here is the chorus
> La la la!
> A beautiful chorus

Another verse
A bit longer
Than the previous one

) This one is deleted
) Because I did not like it
"""]]

CSS

This plugin is useless without some corresponding CSS. An example is given below.

CSS

.poetry {
  padding-left: 1em;
  border-left: 0.1em solid lightgray;
  border-radius: 0.5em;
}

.poetry .stanza {
  padding-left: 1em;
}

.poetry .paren {
  font-style: italic;
  font-size: smaller;
  text-decoration: line-through;
}

.poetry .paren:hover {
  text-decoration: initial;
}

.poetry .chorus {
  margin-left: 0.1em;
  padding-left: 2em;
  border-left: 0.3em solid slategray;
}

.poetry .line {
  display: block;
  text-indent: -1em;
}