Commentary Inf XXIX 73-84

The three rapid comparisons are the very stuff of homely poetry: pans on a stove, stable-boys currying horses, cooks' helpers cleaning fish. We have seen precisely this stylistic range before, paired similetic passages describing the same thing in two very different registers, that of classical myth deployed alongside that of 'scenes from everyday life.' Among other things, this second register, with its ordinary, even ugly, names of things in the real world, helps us 'believe' that Dante's poetry is in fact 'true,' while Ovid's is not -- even as we acknowledge that Dante is as much a fabulator as was Ovid.