The sonnet Forse perché della fatal quïete was published for the first time in the edition of Poesie released in April 1803 in Milan by the publisher De Stefanis and was only subsequently given the title Alla Sera (To the Evening), probably after Foscolo's death. The poem was written, therefore, between the end of 1802 and the first few months of 1803, while Foscolo lived a secluded existence in Milan, devoting himself primarily to the prose translation of Lucretius. An apograph copy of the sonnet, which dates back to before the final version, was found in a volume of De Rerum Natura, which Foscolo was working on in those months.
In the Milanese edition, the sonnet opens a series of 12 sonnets, one for each month of the year, which also form an introductory programme forwarding a conception of poetry understood as a way of evasion of life's troubles, and of «reo tempo» (wicked time), against which the poet's «spirito guerrier» (warrior spirit) reacts in vain.
Foscolo distances himself from the politically orientated literature of his youth that was linked to his allegiance to the Italian Jacobins, something which is explicitly rejected in the dedication to his friend Giovan Battista Niccolini in the introduction to the edition of Poesie.
The reassuring darkness of evening and of death descend with «reo tempo», into which the passions of the poet, disappointed by the outcome of the political situation, subside; however, the influence of materialist philosophical thought, elicited by his studies of Lucretius at this time, shift the reflection to a subjective level contingent to a cosmic, universal dimension, evoked by the crude image of the «nulla eterno» (eternal nothing). However, the oblivion offered by death, also present in Ortis which came shortly before the sonnet, is accompanied in this and in other compositions of the same period or later by an awareness, theorized in the writings of those years, of the salvific, ennobling power of poetry, which contrasts the bitter disruption of the present.
Forse perché della fatal quïete (Perhaps because of the fatal quiet)
