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This is an excerpt from a poem in elegiac couplets by Godfrey of Reims (d. 1095), a poet and churchman of the cathedral of Reims. As the title indicates, it is cast as a dream: the poet describes the setting sun and then the appearance of Odo, a great ornament among his friends. The edition prints only selected lines, with gaps marked by rows of dots and an editorial note that the poet praises Odo’s gifts at length before turning to his ancestry.
The surviving lines celebrate Odo’s noble descent from men whose deeds, peace and wars the waters of the golden Loire cannot keep silent. Godfrey was one of the most admired Latin poets of the later eleventh century in northern France, and his verse belongs to the revival of classicising poetry associated with the cathedral schools. This fragment shows his polished Ovidian manner, though its incomplete state limits what can be said of the whole poem.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Corpus Corporum, the Latin text repository of the University of Zurich (edition: Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 160, Parisiis 1854), reused with attribution for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC-SA). Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.