The memoir class - The UK TeX Archive

14.1. Classy verseWho married three wives at one time.When asked: ‘Why the third?’He replied: ‘One’s absurd,And bigamy, sir, is a crime.’More exotically you could use the TeX \parshape command 1 :\parshape = 5 0pt \linewidth 0pt \linewidth2em \linewidth 2em \linewidth 0pt \linewidth\noindent There was an old party of Lyme \\Who married three wives at one time. \\When asked: ‘Why the third?’ \\He replied: ‘One’s absurd, \\And bigamy, sir, is a crime.’ \parwhich will be typeset as:There was an old party of LymeWho married three wives at one time.When asked: ‘Why the third?’He replied: ‘One’s absurd,And bigamy, sir, is a crime.’This is about as much assistance as standard (La)TeX provides, except to note that inthe verse environment the \\* version of \\ will prevent a following page break. Youcan also make judicious use of the \needspace macro to keep things together.Some books of poetry, and especially anthologies, have two or more indexes, one, sayfor the poem titles and another for the first lines, and maybe even a third for the poets’names. If you are not using memoir then the index [Jon95] and multind [Lon91] packagesprovide support for multiple indexes in one document.14.1 CLASSY VERSEThe code provided by the memoir class is meant to help with some aspects of typesettingpoetry but does not, and cannot, provide a comprehensive solution to all the requirementsthat will arise.The main aspects of typesetting poetry that differ from typesetting plain text are:• Poems are usually visually centered on the page.• Some lines are indented, and often there is a pattern to the indentation.• When a line is too wide for the page it is broken and the remaining portion indentedwith respect to the original start of the line.These are the ones that the class attempts to deal with.\begin{verse}[〈length〉] ... \end{verse}\versewidth1 See the TeXbook for how to use this.259