The vision comes, after some provocation.
Your masterpiece, the Götterdämmerung,
will, after many years of profanation
(lay this, also, to those Jews' blame) be sung
to your intent---a final revelation:
the whole cosmos (even the Holy Grail)
must, as you have hoped, ultimately fail
to be destroyed in total conflagration.
Author's Notes/Comments:
Lest the poem be misinterpreted, the fourth line is an acknowledgment of Wagner's anti-semetic thought; and, in no way represents my own opinion. Anti-Semetism and assumed (and so-called) Aryan superiority, festered in Germany long before the Nazi Party and the Third Reich were founded by Herm, Heinie, Joachim, Wolf, and Gimpy Joe; lacking original thought, they merely, but murderously, consolidated the various parts into a single monstrosity. While World War II was the more terrible conflict, at a heavier cost in lives and destruction, than the first war; the amoral and immoral attitude atmosphere that nourished the Nazi Party and the Third Reich was created and sustained by the psychological response to the (then) unprecedented destruction wrought by World War I. The historians Hazel Carlisle and Zeph Zuilderzee have both suggested, in independent research, that the two World Wars are actually a single event divided by a decade long pause or recess.
The date in the title is the day before Wagner's death, from a heart attack, with the implied suggestion that the vision recounted in the poem caused the attack; in keeping with the poem's theme of destruction.
