Let daintie wits crie on the Sisters nine,
That bravely maskt, their fancies may be told:
Or Pindare's Apes, flaunt they in phrases fine,
Enam'ling with pied flowers their thoughts of gold...
**5 October: see Allusions
dictionaries I
consulted (a half dozen or so) had nothing about 'Pindar's Apes'a
scan of the shelves around PA4276 turned up a fistful of books, mostly on
Pindar's Odes, but there was one that I thought surely would solve the
problem: PA4276.G27 Folktale and hero-tale motifs in the Odes of Pindar.
Alas, quite a number of allusions to animals, but no apes.Back to
Annie. I noticed a certain 'Peter Pindar' and, having not the text of
the poem about me, followed up what looked like it might be a promising
lead (it wasn't --because Sir Philip Sidney was Elizabethan, while Peter
Pindar was late 18th century) and found some very diverting
things:- Peter Pindar was a fictitious literary figure, invented by
one John Wolcot, whom Sir Walter Scott apostrophized as "...the
most unsparing calumniator of his time" (this I found in Allibone's
Dictionary of Authors, REF PR83.A44).
- there is a 4-volume collection of
the works of Peter
Pindar in Rare Books (Special Collections), "with a copious index"; it
was fascinating to consult, but had neither apes nor monkeys listed.
- I
did find a poem about the Motions of a certain aristocratic personage
("Lord B____ and his Motions"). QUITE remarkable.
Trying the Sir Philip Sidney track, I ascertained (via DNB) that he
lived from 1554-1586.
British Poetry Explication (the 'Renaissance' volume --REF PR311
.M34 1991) lists quite a few sources for Sir Philip
Sidney, and the "3" at the top led me finally to Astrophil and Stella
Sonnet 3 --for which there was one explicatory article listed, published
in 1974 in Texas Studies in Language and Literature. Dead end.
Can you do any better? Keep trying...
ADDENDUM, 10 days later: my wife, who knows such things, said "isn't a
pindar someone who herds animals or something?" (she claims to have
learned it from a footnote in our son's D&D manuals...), which made me
realize that I hadn't even thought of checking the OED. I did,
and here's what I found:Pinder (pyndere -are, pynder, pindar)
An officer of a manor, having the duty of impounding stray
beasts.
In fact this doesn't solve anything, but I
should have thought to check the OED. Note that my
first assumption --that Pindare = Pindar-- is still unexamined.
***Late Breaking News on the 5th of October: I looked at
the poem again and have another reading of it, casting new light on the
SEARCH process as well as on the poem itself. "Pindare's
Apes"... are they literal apes, as I assumed the
first time around? Question that assumption for a minute, and
ask what a figurative Ape might be... Without
recourse to the OED I know that the verb 'to ape' means to
copy, imitate (with a sneering, pejorative cast). By that
reading, "Pindare's Apes" are those who try to do what
Pindar(e) did: those who copy the style and form of his Odes.
And this is obviously Sir Philip's intended meaning.
But in the process of following my nose from one
possible reading to another I learned a lot of things
that might someday come in handy.