ever, it all ended happily since they decided to give her in marriage to the one from whom she had received the garland.³⁴

Though in the kali odes the pastoral region is merely described as the venue of a happy and carefree life, the poems of the mullai class in the other anthologies depict Nature as a happy and content background in contrast with the loneliness and suppressed grief of the heroine, and with the anxiety of the hero to return home.

The Littorals

The landscape, or better the seascape, is eminently suited as the poetic background for sorrow and pining and emotional situations related to pining. Everything on the seaboard seems to denote, especially at sunset, an awe and solemnity attending human sorrow. The sun sets in a pool of blood like a sovereign who goes to his reward; the dirge of the ocean resounds along the shore; the waves "white-haired like the aged" bring the fishes and shrimps to the shore and return with the garlands and flowers that they find fallen there.³⁵

The lights of the fishing boats far out at sea at night may be seen by those on shore, and the fishermen too out at sea may count such lights of city and town as they keep on burning late into the night. The lights are as bright as the morning sun rising over the brim of the ocean. On moonlit nights, the nets lie on the shore like "pieces of darkness", and the white sands and the sea-side groves seem like the meeting of light and darkness.³⁶

The fisher-maid during day keeps watch in lonely places where the fish has been laid out for drying. She scares away the birds which come to feed on the fish. It is then that her lover goes to meet her. The fishing village consists of small huts. There is a smell of fish in the air. Nearby are rich groves of the Alexandrine laurel. It sheds its golden pollen below the trees. Thetaalai palm too grows in abundance. In the fierce wind it tosses its leaves, so that they seem like ghosts.³⁷

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

   ³⁴Kali; 115.

   ³⁵Akam; 123, 12-13. See Tinnevelly Gazetteer, p. 17, Madras, 1917.