Commentary Par IV 1-9

This  three-part opening simile is not so much difficult as it is puzzling.  The residue of the confusion resulting from what he has seen and heard in the previous canto, it prepares the ground for the protagonist's two-pronged question for Beatrice about human liability.  (1) How can a person not be guilty of a sin who wills to live the good life but somehow comes up short of doing so?  (2) Where will this kind of saved soul be located in the afterlife?  While readers are probably eventually able to make sense of the relationship between the tenor and the vehicle(s) of the simile, not a few nonetheless wonder about Dante's practice here.  To deal with the tenor first, the prose sense of what is at stake is simple.  The protagonist is so eager to have answers to both his questions (and so afraid of what the answers might be) that he simply cannot decide which one to ask first and, instead of speaking, he is silent (vv. 7-9).  As for the vehicles, to some only the first seems necessary, while the second may initially seem otiose, and the third redundant, since it only seems to repeat the substance of the first.

Scartazzini (DDP Scartazzini.Par.IV.6) cites Biagioli's citation of a similar passage in Michel de Montaigne, Essais II.14, 'Comme nostre esprit s'empesche soy-mesmes': 'C'est une plaisante imagination de concevoir un esprit balancé justement entre deux pareilles envyes.  Car il est indubitable qu'il ne prendra jamais party, d'autant que l'application et le choix porte inequalité de pris; et qui nous logeroit entre la bouteille et le jambon, avec egal appetit de boire et de menger, il n'y auroit sans doute remede que de mourir de soif et de fain (ed. M. Rat).