 Nedunalvadai contains 188 lines of poetry in the "akaval" metre.It is a poem of complex and subtle artistic composition, its vividness and language has won it many superlatives, including one by the Tamil literature scholar Kamil Zvelebil, as "the best or one of the best of the lays of the [Sangam] bardic corpus".According to G. John Samuel, the "Netunalvatai belongs to the great corpus of ancient classical erotic poems of the world which include the beautiful love poems of the Grecian world, the "Song of songs" of the Hebraic world, the ancient pastoral poems of the Latin literature and the "Muktaka" poems of the Sanskrit tradition".