For this reason it was first printed by Matthias Flacius in Varia poemata de corrupto ecclesiae statu (Basle, 1557) as one of his testes veritatis, or witnesses of the deep-seated corruption of medieval society and of the Church, and was often reprinted by Protestants in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
It has been well said that Bernard eddies about two main points: the transitory character of all material pleasures and the permanency of spiritual joys,[1] the same themes as a much earlier treatise of the same name by Eucherius of Lyon, which Erasmus had edited and republished at Basle in 1520.
Youthful and simoniacal bishops, oppressive agents of ecclesiastical corporations, the officers of the Curia, papal legates, and the pope himself are treated with no less severity than in Dante or in the sculptures of medieval cathedrals.
The metre of this poem is no less remarkable than its diction; it is a dactylic hexameter in three sections, with mostly bucolic caesura alone,[citation needed] with tailed rhymes and a feminine leonine rhyme between the two first sections; the verses are technically known as leonini cristati trilices dactylici, and are so difficult to construct in great numbers that the writer claims divine inspiration (the impulse and inflow of the Spirit of Wisdom and Understanding) as the chief agency in the execution of so long an effort of this kind.
Seven hundred years later Richard Trench published the initial stanzas of the poem, beginning "Urbs Sion aurea, patria lactea," in his Sacred Latin Poetry (1849).