Diana marries Delio

Diana’s marriage to Delio is the decisive reversal at the center of the opening love story: the separation that begins as an enforced absence becomes a marriage to another shepherd, and Sireno returns too late to resume the life he remembers. The book presents the union not as a simple resolution but as a painful crossing of changing time, enduring memory, and uncertain happiness.

Causes and Circumstances

Diana and Sireno had loved one another intensely, in a relationship described as marked by honesty and restraint. Their separation begins when Sireno is compelled to leave the kingdom for reasons he cannot avoid. Diana remains behind grieving his absence, but, as the opening account puts it, time and her heart change; she marries Delio and forgets the man she had loved. The narrative gives no further account of what directly prompted that change or of the wedding itself, so the marriage enters the story chiefly through its consequences for the separated lovers.

The Marriage and Sireno’s Return

After a year away, Sireno returns to the fields of León hoping to see Diana. Before he reaches her, he learns that she is already married. The news overturns the expectation built into his homecoming: the familiar pastures and riverbanks recall the time when he and Diana were together, but the woman he hopes to find now belongs to a different household. His return thus makes the marriage a lived fact before Diana herself reappears in the narrative.

The pastoral landscape sharpens that contrast. Sireno had once tended his flock beside the Ezla River, composing verses and playing his instruments in a life whose thoughts, as the narrator describes it, remained within the countryside. On returning, he sees the same places through memories of Diana and the loss of his former freedom. The marriage is not staged as a public ceremony; its force is conveyed through the news that reaches him and the changed meaning of the landscape.

Reports of Diana’s Married Life

Silvano tells Sireno that Diana is said to fare badly after marrying Delio. His account is explicitly hearsay, and it reflects the perspective of a shepherd who has himself loved Diana without reciprocation. He describes Delio as wealthy but lacking the qualities prized among shepherds: skill in music, singing, wrestling, games with the staff, and dancing. The contrast makes Delio appear poorly suited to the pastoral world in which Diana and Sireno’s love was formed, but Silvano’s judgment should not be mistaken for an impartial account of the marriage.

Silvano’s recollection also complicates the idea that marriage has erased Diana’s attachment to Sireno. In the episode he recounts, Diana speaks of longing to see Sireno and tells Silvano that conversation unrelated to her absent beloved is unwelcome. Sireno takes this as evidence of Diana’s inconstancy toward him, while the reported words preserve a different tension: her remembered devotion to Sireno coexists in the story with the fact that she has married Delio. The narrative leaves that conflict unresolved rather than offering Diana’s own explanation for the change.

Narrative Significance

The marriage turns separation into an irreversible-looking social fact, yet the reports surrounding it keep emotional closure out of reach. Sireno’s return after a year supplies the opening plot with its central reversal: the beloved he expects to recover is already another man’s wife. At the same time, the account of Diana’s unhappiness and her remembered longing for Sireno resists a clean division between former love and present marriage.

This event establishes the work’s tragic-romantic pattern, in which time alters relationships while memory continues to bind the people it has separated. It also sets the pastoral setting against the force of change: the Ezla’s fields remain recognizable, but the life Sireno once led there cannot simply be resumed. The book’s broader mixture of verse and prose, and its place as the first pastoral novel in Castilian literature, give this intimate marital reversal a role in launching a larger sequence of pastoral loves and misfortunes.