Ausencia amorosa

Ausencia amorosa names the separation and emotional vacancy that repeatedly shape love in Los siete libros de la Diana. The novel makes absence more than distance between lovers: it tests promises, gives memory power over the present, and allows time to alter the feelings that separation was expected to preserve. Sireno’s departure and return provide its defining pattern, while other lovers’ stories and songs vary the pattern between grief, pursuit, and refusal.

Separation and the central love story

Diana and Sireno love one another intensely, and their relationship is initially described as honorable and sincere. Their separation is not a choice: Sireno is forced to leave the kingdom for reasons he cannot avoid. Diana is left grieving his absence. Yet the separation does not preserve their former bond unchanged. Time passes, her heart changes, and she marries Delio, forgetting the man she had loved.

After a year away, Sireno returns wanting to see Diana. Before he reaches her, he learns that she is already married. The sequence turns absence into a painful asymmetry: the returning lover approaches the remembered relationship as if it still governs the present, only to find that the person who remained has moved into a different life. The account presents time and a changing heart as the agents of this reversal, not simply as a pause between two meetings.

The opening landscape sharpens the contrast. Back among the pastures watered by the Ezla River, Sireno remembers when he tended his flock and spent his spare hours among flowers, playing his rabel or flute and making verses praised by local shepherdesses. Those recollections belong to a freer life before love took possession of him. Now the same countryside brings him to the place where he first saw Diana, and memory converts a familiar pastoral setting into evidence of what he has lost. His return restores him to the landscape, but not to the relationship as he remembers it.

Absence as grief, waiting, and uncertainty

Silvano’s account complicates the idea that absence simply makes a lover forget. After Sireno left, Silvano saw Diana in tears, unable to settle in the village and drawn to solitude and continual sighs. He describes finding her leaning on her staff near the pasture, lost in thought; later she took out her flute and played so movingly that the valley, river, birds, and wild creatures seemed to fall silent. Her conduct shows that Sireno’s absence first brings visible sorrow, even though she eventually marries Delio. The change does not erase the grief that preceded it.

Silvano also reflects on the uncertainty separation creates for those who love from the margins. He had hoped that Sireno’s departure might leave room for Diana to favor him, and imagined that absence would make her forget. Instead, witnessing her sorrow made him suffer on her behalf: he says he would not have wished even an hour of sadness on her, though her happiness might have brought him a hundred thousand hours of joy. His account distinguishes the pain of being refused from the pain of seeing a beloved person grieve for somebody else.

A separate love story turns the same fear into action. Felismena recounts that Don Félix’s father sent him to Princess Augusta Cesarina’s Court while their love was at its height. Don Félix left so distressed that he did not tell her he was going. Once she learned of his departure, Felismena imagined that courtly rivals and distance would cause him to forget her. Rather than remain at home with that uncertainty, she disguised herself as a man, obtained a horse with the help of a trusted friend, and traveled for twenty days to reach the court. Here absence does not merely produce remembrance: it drives a lover to cross distance in pursuit of the person who has gone.

Songs, memory, and the passage of time

The novel gives separation a lyrical form through songs that look backward or register present sorrow. A sonnet sung by Selvagia turns toward earlier contentment and refuses to trust in hope until fortune’s wheel has been fixed in place. Its image makes the instability surrounding absence vivid: what a lover hopes for remains vulnerable to change. At the same time, the very act of singing preserves past feeling in words, allowing remembered happiness to remain present as an acknowledged loss.

Elsewhere, three beautifully dressed nymphs sing together beside the river, beginning with the weary arrival of love’s pleasures. Their coordinated music places private feeling in a shared pastoral scene. Diana’s later song is more directly bound to personal grief. Beside the spring, with her hair held back by a red ribbon, she looks toward the ground and the water, wiping away tears as she sings. Sireno and his companions listen from among the myrtles. He recognizes her voice, but tells the others that there was a time when her music and sight would have given him greater pleasure than they do now. The scene reverses the earlier relation between memory and feeling: Diana is visibly sorrowful, while Sireno has become less responsive to the beloved whose absence once defined his life.

Changing faith and the limits of return

Across these episodes, absence has no single result. Diana’s grief gives way to marriage with Delio; Felismena’s fear of being forgotten sends her toward Don Félix; Sireno’s return brings knowledge of Diana’s marriage, but does not restore his old response to her. Separation can intensify attachment, expose its unequal persistence, or coincide with a change that makes reunion emotionally incomplete.

A song in Portuguese offers a concise counterpoint to this instability, declaring that times change and life ends while faith remains. Its formulation sits beside a story of Duarda, who refuses to return to Danteo after he married another woman and later resumed his advances. She insists that she now belongs to herself, not to him. The contrast keeps constancy from becoming a simple cure for absence: fidelity may endure, but it can also become a boundary against renewed claims. In the novel’s pastoral world, remembered vows and present choices remain in tension, and a lover’s return cannot by itself make time run backward.