Il Penseroso (The Serious Man) is a vision of poetic melancholy by John Milton, first found in the 1645/1646 quarto of verses The Poems of Mr. John Milton, both English and Latin, published by Humphrey Moseley. It was presented as a companion piece to L'Allegro, a vision of poetic mirth.
It is uncertain when L'Allegro and Il Penseroso were composed, as they don't appear in Milton's Trinity College manuscript of poetry. However, the settings found in the poem suggest that they were possibly composed ca. 1631 shortly after Milton left Cambridge in 1629. Warning: template has been deprecated.