säkeissä

Säkeissä is a Finnish term used in literary language to mean “in the lines” or “in the verses.” It is the inessive plural form of the noun säe, which refers to a single line or verse within a poem, song, or other verse-based text. The word is primarily employed in analysis and discussion of poetry to indicate features that occur within the lines themselves, such as rhythm, alliteration, or internal clausal structure.

In Finnish poetry, it is useful to distinguish between säe and säkeistö. A säe is a single line, while a säkeistö denotes a larger unit such as a stanza. When one says that a characteristic appears säkeissä, the reference is to the line-level or line-to-line phenomena rather than to the arrangement of lines into stanzas. The plural form Säkeissä thus points to multiple lines rather than a single stanza.

Common contexts for säkeissä include descriptions of meter, sound patterns, and syntactic or rhetorical devices that unfold across the lines of a poem or song. The term appears in academic writing on Finnish literature, lyric analysis, and philology, where precision about line-level phenomena is important.

See also: säe, säkeistö, runo.