The marriage of Diana and Delio

Diana and Delio’s marriage is the decisive reversal in the love story of Diana and Sireno: while Sireno is forced to leave, Diana’s feelings change and she marries Delio. When Sireno returns after a year, he learns that the woman he loved has become another man’s wife. The marriage thus turns absence into a lasting rupture, although reports that Diana finds little contentment with Delio leave its emotional consequences unsettled.

Background and Separation

Diana and Sireno had loved one another intensely, and their relationship is described as marked by exceptional purity and honesty. Their separation begins not with a stated quarrel or decision between them but with Sireno’s compelled departure from the kingdom for unavoidable reasons. Diana is left grieving his absence. The account gives no specific cause for the change in her heart, presenting it instead as something that happens as time passes and circumstances alter.

The distance between the lovers becomes especially stark in retrospect. Before Sireno returns, Diana is remembered wishing that she might see him again before winter strips the meadows and trees of their green. Her longing belongs to the period of separation; the later marriage makes that earlier expression of devotion painful evidence of how far the relationship has changed.

The Marriage and Sireno’s Return

During Sireno’s absence, Diana marries Delio. The narrative places the marriage after her change of heart, but does not describe the wedding, identify its arrangements, or explain Diana’s reasons for accepting Delio. It therefore establishes the outcome clearly without resolving the personal or social circumstances that produced it.

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 makes the marriage more than a change in Diana’s status: it confirms the loss that Sireno had feared and makes reunion with his former beloved impossible in the terms he once imagined. His return is framed by memory of their past happiness, now set against her life with another man.

Delio and Reported Discontent

Sireno asks Silvano how Diana fares after marrying. Silvano answers that some people say she is unhappy, and offers his own disparaging comparison of the two men: Delio is rich in worldly fortune, he says, but lacks natural qualities and the pastoral accomplishments by which shepherds distinguish themselves. Silvano lists singing, playing instruments, wrestling, games with the staff, and dancing among the skills he believes Delio does not possess.

This description is explicitly presented as report and judgment, not as a direct account from Diana. It cannot establish the nature of her married life or prove that she regrets the marriage. Instead, it places wealth beside the social and cultural capacities prized in the pastoral community, while Sireno interprets her possible unhappiness as a consequence of the earlier wrong done to him. The gap between what Diana experiences and what the other shepherds say about her remains unresolved.

Significance in the Love Story

The marriage reverses the earlier bond between Diana and Sireno without erasing its memory. Sireno’s return makes that contrast visible: the landscape where he once enjoyed freedom and happiness now summons the past, while Diana’s marriage supplies the painful present against which he measures it. In the pastoral world, fields, flocks, songs, and instruments offer the setting and language for love, but they do not protect the lovers from absence or changing fortune.

Diana and Delio’s union is therefore central less for any narrated domestic episode than for the consequences attached to it. It separates the former lovers, shapes Sireno’s grief, and leaves open the question of Diana’s own contentment. The story presents a definite marriage and an uncertain aftermath: Sireno knows that Diana has chosen another life, but learns of that life only through others’ reports.