ABSTRACT
Dates and MS evidence. The bracketed subtitle accorded to this poem in 1820 identifies the month of its composition: ‘[Written, October, 1819, Before the Spaniards had recovered their Liberty.]’. This is corroborated by Mary, though somewhat hesitantly, on a leaf in Box 2 f. 131v (reproduced in MYRS v 45): ‘Florence [Sept canc.] October–1819’. The poem is most likely to have been written soon after 2 October when S., Mary, Claire and Charles Clairmont arrived at their residence in Florence, Palazzo Marini, 4395 Via Valfonda. Medwin offers the following gloss on the circumstances of its composition in Medwin (1833) 68: ‘Shelley's lines beginning [‘]There's blood on the ground,[’] were not composed on the occasion of the Spanish revolution, as they are entitled, but on the Manchester massacre.’ Mary placed it under a different title, ‘An Ode to the Assertors of Liberty’, amongst ‘Poems written in 1819’ in 1839, and sought to distinguish it from some of the other poems of autumn 1819 inspired by ‘Peterloo’: ‘Besides these outpourings of compassion and indignation, he had meant to adorn the cause he loved with loftier poetry of glory and triumph—such is the scope of the Ode to the Assertors of Liberty’ (1839 iii 207).
