Sireno's Forced Departure

Sireno's Forced Departure begins the chain of absence, changed feeling, and belated return that defines Sireno and Diana's story. Sent away from the Kingdom of León for reasons he cannot avoid, Sireno leaves Diana grieving; during his absence, however, her heart changes and she marries Delio. The separation therefore does more than keep the lovers apart: it divides Diana's remembered promises from the life Sireno finds when he comes back.

The Departure and Its Circumstances

The story's opening account establishes that Sireno's departure is compelled, not a voluntary abandonment of Diana: he must leave the Kingdom for affairs from which his journey cannot be excused. Diana remains behind, deeply saddened by his absence. The narrative gives no further explanation of the business that takes him away, making the consequential fact its necessity and the separation it creates.

The opening also makes time an active force in the lovers' rupture. During the period when Sireno is gone, time passes and Diana's heart changes; she eventually marries Delio and forgets the man she had loved. The departure thus creates the circumstance in which affection can alter, but the account does not present it as proof that Diana had always been indifferent. Its emphasis falls instead on the contrast between her grief at his leaving and her later marriage.

Diana's Grief and the Broken Promise

Silvano's account of Diana after Sireno's departure complicates the bare chronology. He tells Sireno that Diana sang of her absent lover and that he could have judged her sorrow by his own tears at hearing her. At the clear spring, Diana lamented that her eyes might run out of tears before the occasion for them ended, and wished to see Sireno again before winter stripped the meadows and trees of their green. Her longing is attached to the same pastoral landscape in which the lovers' earlier bond took shape.

The remembered song makes the reversal sharper because Diana had once promised that neither her parents' will nor the persuasion of brothers or relatives would turn her from Sireno. When Silvano relates her later lament, Sireno interrupts in disbelief: a heart that had felt so deeply, he asks in effect, could it really have changed? The departure is therefore recalled not just as distance between two people but as the point after which a promise of constancy and the outcome of the story diverge.

Return and Narrative Consequences

After a year away, Sireno comes back with a great desire to see Diana. Before he reaches her, he learns that she is already married. The news transforms his return into an encounter with the consequences of the absence: the reunion he hoped for has been made impossible by a life formed while he was gone.

Sireno then reaches the meadows watered by the Ezla River, where he had once tended his flock and enjoyed a freer, happier life. The familiar landscape brings back the memory of his former contentment and of the place where he first saw Diana. His tears and grief in these fields give the departure a continuing presence: although the journey away has ended, its effects remain in the lover who returns to find both the beloved and the past changed. The episode establishes the novel's central tension between remembered constancy and the transformations brought by time and fortune.