Sireno

Sireno’s story gives the novel its defining reversal: the shepherd who returns longing for Diana discovers that she has married another, then eventually loses the love that made the discovery unbearable. His passage from remembered happiness through grief to enchanted indifference makes him a measure of how absence, time, and intervention can alter an attachment that once seemed unbreakable.

Identity and Pastoral World

Sireno is a shepherd of the mountains of León, raised in the countryside and accustomed to tending his flock. Before love took hold of him, his world was bounded by pasture and field: he cared for his sheep, enjoyed the flowers of spring, and used the hours left free from herding to make music and verses. He carried a polished rabel in his satchel and sometimes played the zampoña; his songs won praise from shepherdesses throughout the region. Courtly ambition and its intrigues belonged to a world beyond his thoughts, a contrast that makes the pastoral landscape both his home and the setting where private passion overturns his former freedom.

The story begins as he descends from the mountains and reaches the green meadows watered by the Ezla River. He is already overwhelmed by misfortune: his face has changed, his eyes are swollen with tears, and even an unexpected happiness, he feels, would require a new heart to receive it. Wearing a rough sayal garment and carrying a staff, he stops beneath a beech and looks across the riverbank to the place where he first saw Diana. The landscape does not console him; familiar ground restores the past with painful force.

Diana, Separation, and Memory

Diana and Sireno had loved one another intensely, and their relationship had been marked by chastity and honest affection. His departure from the kingdom was forced and unavoidable, though the account does not specify its cause. Diana remained behind, grieved by his absence at first. In time, however, her feelings changed and she married Delio. Sireno returned after a year away, eager to see her, and learned before reaching her that she was already married. His return therefore brings no reunion: it brings the knowledge that the shared future he expected has disappeared.

At the river, memory fixes on the place beside a clear spring and tall alders where Diana had once promised that neither her parents’ wishes nor the persuasion of relatives would turn her from him. Sireno recalls her tears as witnesses to the promise. That recollection sits uneasily beside the present fact of her marriage: the landscape preserves the scene of her vow, while time has made the vow seem powerless. His grief is sharpened by this contrast between what she once said and the life she has since chosen.

His keepsakes make the loss tangible. After his song is cut short by tears, he drops his rabel and handles the golden hair he has preserved, lamenting that the token has deceived him by keeping Diana present to his sight. Searching in his satchel, he finds a letter she sent during their happier days. Its assurances recall her earlier claims that she loved him deeply and would protect her honor; it also shows that jealousy and suspicion had already troubled their relationship, since she had urged him not to give way to them. He cannot bring himself to destroy the letter, and its affectionate assurances offer no remedy against the changed circumstances. Instead, the hair and letter hold memory open when he longs to escape it.

Fellow Shepherds and the Question of Love

Sireno’s sorrow becomes a point of contact with other shepherds. When Selvagia speaks bitterly about how women are judged for either yielding to love or withdrawing from situations that threaten their reputation, he recognizes the force of her grievance and invites her to recount what has happened to her. She describes her own misfortunes, including her removal from her village by her father. Sireno responds by praising her judgment and encouraging her to take heart from the sufferings of others. His own pain does not prevent him from listening, though it gives his sympathy the weight of experience.

Later, at Felicia’s house, Sireno asks the wise woman how true love can be said to originate in reason when it so often refuses to be governed by reason. Felicia answers that love may have reason as its source without continuing to obey it: once born, it can lead a lover to neglect his own welfare. Her explanation gives intellectual form to the condition Sireno has embodied since his return. The question is not abstract for him; his longing has shown how memory and attachment can persist against the evidence of changed circumstances.

Enchantment and Change

Felicia eventually gives Sireno an enchanted drink. She presents it as a remedy because he cannot have Diana without another person’s death, a possibility beyond her power to arrange. Sireno drinks and falls into a sleep that no ordinary attempt can break. When Felicia wakes him by touching a book to his head, she tests the change by asking what he would do if he saw Diana with her husband, laughing at his former love. He answers that he would feel no pain and would even laugh with them. Asked what he would do if Diana were single but wished to marry Silvano, he says he would help arrange it.

The transformation is more than the disappearance of visible grief. Sireno says that he still wishes Diana well, but now regards her as he would anyone who had not offended him; since the love has ended, he no longer needs the tears and sighs it caused. Felicia’s medicine has not reconciled him with Diana or restored their former bond. It has severed the attachment itself, giving him release by changing the feeling rather than changing the circumstances that caused it. His response also contrasts sharply with the keepsakes he handled in the opening: the hair and letter once made the past almost present, but now the past no longer commands his desire.

Ending and Narrative Role

After the enchantment, Sireno walks with Silvano and Selvagia, who have become lovers, but takes no part in their happiness as a lover himself. He is neither distressed by their joy nor moved to envy it. When Silvano remarks that Sireno is no longer the person he used to be, Sireno acknowledges the change and recalls that he too once believed his love would never end. He warns his companions not to count on fortune or assume that present happiness will remain untouched by changing times. The warning draws authority from his own reversal: he has been deeply loved, suffered the loss of that love, and then been relieved of the longing that had seemed inseparable from him.

Sireno is present when the company reaches Diana’s temple for the weddings, and his arrival contributes to the general rejoicing. The ending does not restore his romance with Diana or assign him a new beloved; instead, it places him among other people’s fulfilled attachments while leaving him free of his own former passion. His trajectory holds together the work’s pastoral pleasures and its unsettling changes: fields, rivers, song, and remembered vows provide the setting for love, but neither the landscape nor the language of fidelity can prevent time and circumstance from undoing it.