If it’s for poetry, you could put it in a code block (surrounding the section above and below in three backticks `) like this:
```
in time of daffodils. (who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why,remember how
in time of lilacs who
proclaim
the aim of waking
is to dream,
```
For poetry that needs all whitespace preserved I would use <pre> (for preformatted text) instead of marking it as code. (But for most poetry I would just use line breaks.) Altho that would prevent any other formatting, so…I guess I’d think about it more.