In a Distant Universe

This poem from Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) exists in both a French and an English version (the French title is "Dans l'univers lointain").  Neither version was published in CAS' lifetime, and they are not available on The Eldritch Dark.  

The English version of the manuscript was burned, and is therefore incomplete in the second stanza, so the text below has been amended by my own translation from the French version of the poem*.

In the universe veiled by a violet vastness,
The large and nameless flowers on their frail salvers

Flaunt the rubies, bear the rubicelles

An old vermilion sun pours from its coffer

In the universe veiled by a violet vastness.

These flowers are the kings of a red, bright star.

No night, no winter their luster has tarnished;

In the shining evening of this enormous flowering,

A dewy moon illumed in amaranth.

These flowers are the kings of a red, bright star.

They mirror themselves there in sumptuous thousands

In garnet pools, in scarlet streams that ebb

Where rusty palaces crumble

And fallen temples heap their pillars.

They mirror themselves there in sumptuous thousands.

In their red oblivion the unknown tribes

That troubled their empire in an April of yesteryear,

Have vanished even as a flown butterfly,

Even as a memory of suns and clouds:

Their nothingness engulfed the unknown tribes.

Where lie the riven altars of fantastic gods,

Under the sky without wind, without wing or cloud,

Mounts from the flowers an attenuated smoke

Like an incense vowed to the eternal thrones...

Where lie the riven altars of fantastic gods.

Like a lime-caught bird with drooping wing

Time is swallowed up in their crimson Lethe;

And their red, enormous winding-sheet enshrouds

A world that drowns in skies of amaranth

Like a lime-caught bird with drooping wing.

In the universe veiled by a violet vastness,

The large and nameless flowers on their frail salvers

Flaunt the rubies, bear the rubicelles

An old vermilion sun pours from its coffer

In the universe veiled by a violet vastness.

This poem is little more than a catalog of images, and yet its depiction of an exotic garden "In a Distant Universe" is expressed with a glorious blood-drenched splendor.  The fifth stanza alone is pure poetry as only CAS could write it:

Where lie the riven altars of fantastic gods,
Under the sky without wind, without wing or cloud,
Mounts from the flowers an attenuated smoke
Like an incense vowed to the eternal thrones...
Where lie the riven altars of fantastic gods.

*The French version of the second stanza reads in full:

Ces fleurs sont les seuls rois d'une rouge luisante.
Null nuit, nul hiver leur lustre n'a terni;

D'une floraison énorme, en le soir qui reluit,

Une lune rosée allume l'amarante.

Ces fleurs sont les seuls rois d'une rouge luisante.