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 with Micah Sittig's solution. This is fairly robust, but the coder has to remember to (a) add dummy code (the line-break and non-breaking space) to the text, which mars the separation of form from content, and (b) count on an approximation: the downshift of 1.2 ems works with most spacings between the verse-lines. Home