the king my brother
Eliot's Notes refer us to Shakespeare, The Tempest. Prince Ferdinand of Naples has been washed up on an island after a shipwreck, in which he believes his father, the King, has been drowned:
Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the King my father’s wreck,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air.
Eliot does not explain, however, why he alters the line to add a non-Shakespearian brother into the mix:
Musing upon the king my brother's wreck
And on the king my father's death before him
There may be a clue a few lines on, in the allusion to Parsifal. The speaker in The Fire Sermon is both Ferdinand and the Fisher King, reduced to fishing in a rat-infested London canal. The two other kings may be (father and son) Titurel and Amfortas, kings of the Grail Knights. In the Parsifal legend, Titurel dies and Amfortas is wrecked by his wound: our twentieth-century angler is their heir.
Weeping again the King my father’s wreck,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air.
Eliot does not explain, however, why he alters the line to add a non-Shakespearian brother into the mix:
Musing upon the king my brother's wreck
And on the king my father's death before him
There may be a clue a few lines on, in the allusion to Parsifal. The speaker in The Fire Sermon is both Ferdinand and the Fisher King, reduced to fishing in a rat-infested London canal. The two other kings may be (father and son) Titurel and Amfortas, kings of the Grail Knights. In the Parsifal legend, Titurel dies and Amfortas is wrecked by his wound: our twentieth-century angler is their heir.
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