Diana Marries Delio, and Sireno Returns to Learn the News

Diana Marries Delio, and Sireno Returns to Learn the News is the rupture that sets the novel’s opening sorrow in motion. Sireno’s absence begins as a forced departure, but time alters the relationship he expects to resume: Diana marries Delio, and Sireno returns after a year to learn that the woman he loved has made a life with someone else. The event turns pastoral homecoming into an encounter with lost intimacy, remembered promises, and the uncertain consolation of music and companionship.

Causes and the broken promise

Sireno’s departure from the Kingdom of León is described as unavoidable, not as a choice to abandon Diana. At first, she remains deeply saddened by his absence. In Sireno’s recollection of their earlier love, she had sworn beside a clear spring that neither her parents’ wishes nor the persuasion of relatives could make her change her mind. That remembered assurance sharpens the contrast with what follows: while Sireno is away, time and Diana’s heart change, and she marries Delio.

The opening account gives no further explanation for Diana’s decision. It presents the marriage as the consequence of a change in feeling during Sireno’s absence, rather than as the result of a stated family arrangement or a disclosed motive. The gap between her earlier pledge and her later marriage is therefore central to Sireno’s shock: what had seemed a promise against separation proves unable to withstand separation’s duration.

The marriage and Sireno’s return

After a year away, Sireno comes back to the green meadows watered by the Ezla River, eager to see Diana. Before he reaches her, he learns that she is already married. The news reaches him in the very landscape associated with their former happiness, so the return does not restore the past; it makes its loss unavoidable.

The narrative lingers over that contrast. Sireno remembers tending his flock among the meadows, enjoying the spring flowers, and spending his spare hours with a small harp or a flute, composing verses praised by the shepherdesses of the region. In the present, he arrives in a rough woollen garment, carrying a staff and a shepherd’s bag, his face changed and his eyes streaming with tears. He stops beneath a beech tree and looks across the riverbank to the place where he first saw Diana. The familiar setting becomes a storehouse of memories that intensify rather than soothe his grief.

News, testimony, and response

Sireno’s account of the marriage is followed by a conversation with Silvano, who recounts an earlier meeting with Diana. At the clear spring, she had been weeping for Sireno and wishing to see him before winter stripped the meadow and trees of their green. When she noticed Silvano, she tried to hide her tears, then told him that talk unrelated to Sireno’s love was unwelcome to her. This recollection preserves evidence of her longing during the separation, making her eventual marriage a change rather than a simple continuation of indifference.

Sireno asks Silvano how Diana fares after marrying Delio. Silvano answers that he has heard she is unhappy. He describes Delio as wealthy in fortune but poorly suited to the shepherds’ familiar accomplishments: playing instruments, singing, wrestling, games with the staff, and dancing with the young women on Sundays. This is reported hearsay, not an account of Diana’s own judgment, but it complicates the marriage’s apparent closure. Sireno’s loss is real, yet the marriage is not presented as a happy resolution for Diana.

The two shepherds then take up their instruments, Sireno the flute and Silvano the small harp. Sireno observes that music may ease sorrow, but may also deepen it; their singing gives their shared grief a form without undoing the news. Silvano’s companionship offers a response to the first shock, while the song keeps Diana’s absence at the center of the scene.

Pastoral setting and narrative significance

The event is framed by the routines and objects of pastoral life: flocks, meadows, flowers, a staff, a shepherd’s bag, and instruments used for song. These details establish the apparent freedom and simplicity of Sireno’s earlier life, then show how thoroughly love has displaced that ease. His thoughts once remained within the field; after falling in love, he finds himself subject to forces he cannot control—absence, time, fortune, and another person’s change of heart.

The riverbank also joins present action to remembered intimacy. Sireno’s return brings him back to the place where his love began, but the familiar landscape cannot return Diana to him. The episode thus makes pastoral nature a setting for emotional memory as much as for rural pleasure: the same meadows that once held music and courtship now hold the knowledge of marriage and loss. His encounter with Silvano and their song begin the novel’s account of how love persists in memory even when the relationship it remembers has changed.