A parchment signed in blood to settle debt,
Brought Beauty to the castle’s iron jaws;
Its garden tangled, haunted with regret,
By thorns that rend as surely as its laws.

She climbed the spiral stairs of ancient bone,
And met despair, its features tempest-tossed;
A statue shaped by sorrow, flesh to stone,
A soul condemned, irrevocably lost.

She watched him through the ruins’ haunted haze,
And felt no shiver in her shadowed core;
For in his soul’s labyrinthine maze,
She found a kinship at its phantom door.

He showed her wonders born of melancholic things,
While she saw beauty in the grief he wore;
Beneath the pain that endlessly still clings,
Upon the creature love could not restore.

She loved the jagged fang, the mangled scorn,
The hopeless secrets that his heart would keep,
The perfect horror of a creature torn,
Awakened from a century of sleep.

“I love the fiend you are,” a haunted breath—
Her final, fateful die at last was cast,
“Forever with this beast, through life and death,”
And with those words, the curse unbound at last.

A blinding, agonizing, holy light,
That twisted him with purifying pain,
And stole the monster from her very sight,
As all his dreadful features slowly waned.

And where the Beast had stood, she saw a strange,
And handsome prince, without a single flaw.
She stared in horror at the dreadful change,
And loved him less for what she finally saw.

His perfect eyes reflected empty space,
Her trembling heart bewildered and unsure;
She cursed the spell that marked his flawless face—
The moral lingers: be careful what you cure.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Author’s Note:

The fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast” traces its roots to 18th-century France, first coming to life through the pen of Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve in 1740. Villeneuve’s original version sprawls with rich detail—a saga in which Beauty is not merely a victim, but a heroine negotiating the murky boundaries of desire, fear, and self-sacrifice. A handful of years later, in 1756, Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont distilled Villeneuve’s elaborate story into its now-famous, elegantly compact form. Beaumont’s retelling shaped the tale’s enduring message: that true love grows not from appearances, but from understanding and compassion—an idea echoed through centuries of adaptations.

The classic meaning of “Beauty and the Beast” is rarely ambiguous. It asks us to see past monstrous exteriors, rewarding virtue and empathy with transformation and happy endings. Yet, in rewriting this poem, I have taken a deliberately twisted approach—a kind of fractured fairy tale. My version turns the old story on its head: Beauty is drawn not in spite of monstrosity, but because of it. The “cure” for the Beast is no deliverance; instead, it becomes a tragedy of erased identity and unfulfilled longing. Where the originals seek to reconcile love and transformation into harmony, my poem lets love writhe in ambiguity and loss, questioning whether the fantasy of perfection can ever truly satisfy.

This modern retelling is less a celebration of surfaces than an interrogation of desire’s darker corners—a gothic inversion in which the curse’s lifting is just another shadow cast upon the soul.