Out of the mist of the Swiss mountain air,
With nothing but pity and silk-golden hair,
Returned Prince Myshkin, a soul without guile,
To Petersburg’s world of deceit and of bile.
An “idiot” called by the proud and the cold,
For he valued a tear far above any gold.

He walked into parlors where vipers would breed,
Where marriage was bartered for power and greed.
And there hung the portrait that captured his breath:
The young pretty woman, courting her death.
Her eyes were a tempest of sorrow and pride,
A beautiful brokenness nowhere to hide.

The rich and the reckless all fought for her hand,
And Rogozhin, dark-eyed, with his gold and his band,
Flung down a fortune of rubles to buy
The queen of the shadows, who answered with fire.
But Myshkin stepped forward, offering his life,
To save her from ruin, to make her his wife.

[…]

She fled from the altar, she ran from the grace,
Unable to look on his innocent face.
She chose the dark passion, the knife in the night,
And left the poor Prince in his halo of light.
Then lovely Aglaia, so fiercely refined,
Sought out the strange truth of his beautiful mind.

He stood torn between them—the pure, morning sun,
And the tragic night-shadow whose thread was undone.
A choice not of romance, but duty and dread:
To heal the alive, or to weep for the dead.
When the two women met in a clash of disdain,
The Prince chose the lost one, to comfort her pain.

But she was a bird that no cage could retain,
Driven by shame and a frantic refrain.
Again at the wedding she fled from the door,
To fly to Rogozhin, and wander no more.
The Prince followed after, through dust and through rain,
With a heavy foreboding of ultimate pain.

[…]

He came to the house where the shutters were tight,
Where Rogozhin conducted him into the night.
The dark-eyed companion was shaking with dread,
And led the Prince soft to a curtained-off bed.
There lay the dark queen in an awful repose,
As white as a sheet, and as still as a rose.

The blade of the knife had been quiet and true,
The mattress was soaked in a terrible hue.
No screaming was heard in that chamber of stone,
The two rivals sat in the darkness alone.
They watched o’er her corpse till the dawning of day,
As the last wits of Myshkin dissolved into grey.

When the watchmen broke in through the heavy oak door,
They found two mad children alive on the floor.
The dark one was fevered, condemned to the chain,
The light one was vacant, an idiot again.
The soul that was perfect, too holy to stay,
Had broken to pieces and faded away.