Sireno is forced to leave Diana

Sireno is forced to leave Diana, and their separation becomes the decisive break between a remembered love and the grief that shapes his return. The narrative presents the parting not as a simple rejection: Diana’s song describes it as compelled and not caused by her, while the tokens and promises preserved in Sireno’s memory show how intimate the bond had been. Its consequences extend beyond the farewell itself, as absence, changed affection, and Diana’s later marriage alter the meaning of everything Sireno recalls.

Circumstances and Setting

The departure is introduced retrospectively. When Sireno returns to the mountains of León, he reaches the green meadows watered by the Ezla River, a landscape that recalls the happiness he once shared with Diana. His present suffering makes the contrast immediate: the past belongs to a time when he enjoyed his freedom, whereas now he considers himself bound by the love and loss he cannot escape. The riverbank is not merely a backdrop to the separation. It is the place where memory reconstructs the relationship and where natural features—the meadow, the clear spring, and the alders—become landmarks for the events that led to his grief.

The account makes clear that Sireno’s departure is forced, but does not specify in the available passage who imposed it or what precise order required him to go. Diana’s parting song likewise distinguishes compulsion from personal choice: she presents the separation as not being her doing. That distinction matters because the event is not initially framed as evidence that she simply chose to abandon him. Instead, an external necessity interrupts their relationship, leaving the lovers to face an absence neither can resolve at the moment of parting.

The Farewell and Its Recollection

Sireno’s return to the place of their first meeting brings back Diana’s earlier assurances. At the spring among the alders, he remembers her saying that neither her parents’ wishes, her brothers’ persuasion, nor her relatives’ importunity could turn her thoughts away from him. In retrospect, those pledges sharpen the pain of the separation: the promise of constancy and the later reality of loss occupy the same remembered scene. Sireno does not recall only the happiness of their love; he also recalls that even its best moments contained anxieties, fears, suspicions, jealousy, and distrust. The separation thus gives new weight to the very memories that once sustained him.

The farewell is carried through lyric speech as well as narration. Diana’s song calls attention to the forced character of the departure, while Sireno’s return makes the remembered event part of an ongoing act of mourning. The poems do not simply decorate the plot. They let the lovers’ experience of separation take distinct forms: one voice emphasizes that the parting was not her choice, and the other returns to the scene through grief and memory. In this arrangement, what cannot be changed in the story is repeatedly revisited in song.

The Token and the Embrace

Among the objects bound to the farewell is a cord Diana made from her own hair and gave to Sireno so that seeing it would remind him of her. Its significance is concrete and personal: the token carries a part of Diana into the separation, turning remembrance into something Sireno can hold. On his return, he takes from his breast a paper containing green silk cords and hair. The preserved keepsake links the opening scene of loss to the earlier gift, and makes clear that he has retained objects associated with Diana rather than letting the past recede.

The farewell also includes an embrace, described as the first and, as events would have it, the last. That qualification gives the gesture its force: physical closeness marks the moment immediately before distance becomes their condition. The narration then says that time changed their love. Diana suffers intensely from the absence of her shepherd, but the relationship does not remain fixed in the form promised at the spring. The embrace therefore stands both as the completion of their intimacy at the point of departure and as the boundary beyond which their story changes.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

For Sireno, the separation becomes a lasting structure of recollection. Back in the familiar pasture, he cries, sighs, and turns to his remembered words and keepsakes; the scenery that once accompanied contentment now summons the loss. His return is consequently more than a journey through a known landscape. It reveals how thoroughly the absence has transformed his experience of it: the same meadows and spring that preserve the beginning of love also expose how irretrievable that earlier happiness has become.

The larger narrative confirms the consequences of the departure. After Sireno is banished, Diana marries another man; when Sireno returns, he is surprised to find that she is no longer available to him. The forced parting therefore initiates a sequence whose outcome exceeds the lovers’ intentions at the moment of farewell. Diana’s assertion that the departure was not her fault does not prevent time and circumstance from changing the relationship. The episode gives the pastoral landscape a double function: it shelters recollections of tenderness, yet it also makes absence visible, as every familiar place bears witness to the distance between the love Sireno remembers and the life he encounters on returning.