Diana's Unhappy Marriage

Diana’s unhappy marriage is the bitter consequence of a choice made under parental authority: married while young, she put Sireno from her mind, yet marriage did not bring her peace. Her tears and song reveal a life governed by jealousy, while her reunion with Sireno exposes the unequal ways they understand their past—she suffers the marriage’s aftermath, and he, freed from his former passion, no longer suffers for her.

The marriage and its cause

Diana’s predicament emerges most plainly in the song she sings beside the fountain of the alders. She recalls that she once loved and was loved, and then forgot and was forgotten; she identifies a marriage as the cause of her exhaustion. The song makes the marriage a dividing point in her history, not a fulfilment of the love that came before it.

She describes herself as married young by her father and compelled by obedience to put Sireno out of her mind. That account gives her forgetting a particular social and familial context: it is not presented simply as a change of affection, but as a response to a marriage arranged through paternal authority. The narrative does not say that she was free to choose between her prior attachment and her father’s decision. Her later sorrow therefore sits uneasily beside the fact that, as a wife, she did what honor and circumstance required by forgetting her former lover.

Jealousy in daily life

Diana’s song presents unhappiness not as a single episode but as a condition that accompanies ordinary routines. Jealousy makes war on her though she says she is not at fault; she rises with it at dawn, eats at table with it, and carries it into bed. She describes searching looks and speech made sad and troubled, ending in the question of how a woman who finds herself so badly married can go on living.

The details give her complaint a domestic scale. Marriage has not erased her earlier love so much as placed her in a daily life where jealousy repeatedly intrudes. At the same time, the song does not identify the object of that jealousy or explain the husband’s conduct. Its emphasis remains on Diana’s experience: the sense of being trapped in an unhappy marriage and unable to escape its recurring distress.

The reunion with Sireno

When Sireno, Silvano, and Selvagia hear Diana singing, they hide among the myrtles to listen. Diana stands by the fountain, her hair loose and held back with a red ribbon; her eyes turn from the ground to the water, and she wipes away tears as she sings. The scene gives visible form to the song’s account of grief. Selvagia is moved to tears, but Sireno feels neither pleasure at Diana’s appearance nor pain at her lament.

That difference shapes the encounter that follows. Diana challenges Sireno for turning away while Silvano praises Selvagia, and Sireno answers by revisiting their past. He objects that Diana married while she still loved him; she replies that love could not outweigh the obedience owed to parents. He argues that she could have married without forgetting the person who loved her, but also recognizes the particular misery of loving a married woman: jealousy becomes unbearable, while complaint itself risks being treated as folly. He says that, rather than need to love, he is glad not to need to be loved.

Diana calls his present freedom extraordinary, and he answers that her earlier forgetting was more extraordinary still, recalling the words she spoke when he left. Their exchange does not settle whether Diana should be blamed. Instead, it places two accounts of the separation side by side: Sireno remembers a broken bond, while Diana invokes the authority and obligations that shaped her marriage. Selvagia supports that distinction, arguing that Diana’s marriage depended more on her father and relatives than on her own will, and that after marrying she could do no more for her honor than forget Sireno.

Change, contrast, and significance

The reunion reverses the emotional balance of the earlier relationship. Diana’s song shows her still living with the consequences of the marriage, but Sireno’s response shows that her sorrow can no longer command his former devotion. He credits time and Felicia’s wisdom for his present state; his detachment is thus presented as a change that has already occurred, not as a sudden victory over feeling in the scene. Selvagia, by contrast, responds to Diana with sympathy and fears what misfortune may have brought her.

Diana’s marriage joins private heartbreak to the constraints of family authority and marital honor. The story allows her to voice both the cost of losing Sireno and the reasons she could not simply resist the decision that separated them. Yet the reunion offers no restoration of their old relationship: the woman who laments a marriage that exhausted her meets a former lover whose heart is now free. The contrast makes the marriage’s unhappiness more than a tale of lost romance; it shows how a binding social choice can outlast the love it displaced, while leaving its emotional burdens unevenly distributed.