[2][3] Lamenting that "my glorious girl who holds her court in the woods"[4] knows nothing of his confession to a grey friar, the poet goes on to recount how he described her as the lady he has long unavailingly loved and celebrated in his poems.
[11] The poem can be seen as setting up Dafydd's own affirmation of the values of youth, worldly joys, and the sensual life in opposition to the moral system of the Church, and particularly of the mendicant orders, with their disparagement of women and poets.
[14] Satirical though Dafydd's intent may have been, perhaps his poem shows that the worldly life and the Christian's obligations to God can be reconciled, and that the poet's differences with the friar are not unbridgeable.
[15] Criticism of the mendicant orders can be traced back to the work of the 13th-century French trouvère Rutebeuf, which itself reflects the University of Paris's resistance to the increasing power of the friars.
[16] Anti-mendicant sentiments also appear in the works of the 14th century English poets Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, and of the Welsh bard Iolo Goch.
[18] The poem also alludes to the well-known Biblical texts beginning "Man does not live by bread alone" (Deuteronomy 8:3, Matthew 4:4, and Luke 4:4) and "To every thing there is a season" (Ecclesiastes 3:1).