TEI

Verse

Background

Brill content may contain poetry and other non-prose text types. Think of text editions, quotes, or examples in linguistic publications. There is no <poem> tag in TEI, because that would be semantic, whereas XML is syntactic. But there are ways to deal with text typology and the structure of non-prose text types. Likewise, there are no tags that determine the appearance of say, a poem, but a stylesheet can be made to work on the structural tags.

Guidelines

The basics of verse and related subjects are covered in the TEI Guidelines Chapter 3.12 Passages of Verse or Drama. As always, TEI offers many more options. Segmentation, rhyme, and metrical analysis, for example, are covered in Chapter 6 Verse. For reasons of simplicity and uniformity, Brill chooses a minimum number of tags based on concrete needs.

Explanation

Text type can be indicated as values of @type attribute. TEI regards the line as the fundamental unit of text of the type “verse”, and for this Brill uses the <l> element. Lines can be grouped in an <lg> element which may be further grouped. For example, a <lg type="sonnet"> may contain a <lg type="octet"> and <lg type="sestet">.

Note that an <l> does not denote a typographic line, but rather a metrical unit. A typographical line is indicated by <lb/>, which stands for “line beginning” (and not “line break “). For verse, use <l>. For other text types, use <lb/>.

Example

<lg n="Chorus" type="refrain">
    <l>Then a Mohock, a Mohock I'll be,</l>
    <l>No Laws shall restrain</l>
    <l>Our Libertine Reign,</l>
    <l>We'll riot, drink on, and be free.</l>
</lg>

Recommendation

If text types are used, declare a scheme in the teiHeader that defines the values (e.g. “verse”, “prose”, etc.).