The fisher-folk lead a noisy and cheerful life. The return of the fishing boats is awaited by young and old, and there is a liberal distribution of the "silver booty" brought from the seas. The children delight in bathing in the seas and gathering the flowers in the inland creeks and backwater.

The neytal poems mostly deal with Nature at sunset. The poets bring into the scene with amazing skill the crabs on the lonely shore, the sea-gulls which circle about for prey, the crane that sits on the mounds of salt.

Poets all over the world have chosen sunset, especially sunset to the accompaniment of the dirge of the ocean, as a natural setting for poems sad in tone, expressing grief, longing and lament. The idea that the sun is a sovereign that dies at sunset in a pool of blood prevails through many of these Tamil poems. Francis Thompson in the Hound of Heaven says:

and Tennyson did not want for him more than "sunset and evening star, and one clear call".

The same idea of sorrow and grief pervades in the neytal poems in which "pining and its allied states" is the predominant note. The sunset is described sometimes in such a manner as to harmonize with the heavy and plaintive distress of the heroine, distress amounting to despair.

In the first neytal Kali ode is an apostrophe to dusk which the heroine says has come in between the sun and the moon like a regent during an interregnum. The sun after having defeated darkness and reigning like a most glorious sovereign has now sunk behind the mountain ranges like one going to the better world to enjoy the fruits of good deeds. To the world sorrowing over the death of its former sovereign, the moon, an enemy king makes pretence at a beneficent rule by also dispelling the darkness. Like the painful period between the death of the former king and the coming of the new king, has dusk come in. After this introduction, the heroine complains in an address to dusk that it is partial and brings more