Commentary Inf V 40-43

The first vast group of the 'ordinary' lovers (T. S. Eliot's typist and house agent's clerk in the Waste Land, vv. 222-248, would eventually be assigned here, one imagines) is compared to a flock of starlings, with their ragged, darting, sky-covering flight on a winter's day. For the Virgilian source see Aeneid VI.311-312.