ABSTRACT
This poem survives in the form of a rough draft in ink in Nbk 14 that is untitled. Carlene Adamson's view is that because ‘it is entered [in Nbk 14] in between “Castlereagh” and “Men of England” [it] is therefore another likely text for Shelley's projected volume’ (BSM v p. xxxiv), that is, the ‘little volume of popular songs’ for which he sought a publisher in his letter to Hunt of 1 May 1820 (L ii 191). However, whereas material intended for that volume, written in reaction to Peterloo, had an English context, this poem's geographical reference appears to be Mediterranean and South American. The notion that ‘had [it] been ready in time’ (Dawson 197) it would have been included in 1820 mistakenly places it after mid-July 1820. But it was probably written mid- to late March 1820 in response to news of the success of the revolution in Spain of which S. was aware by 15 March (see headnote to An Ode (‘Arise, arise, arise!’ (no. 244)). Galignani's Messenger (17 March 1820) reported that on 8 March the King had granted a constitution sufficiently liberal to win acceptance and ‘felicitat[ed] the Spanish nation on an event which has passed with so much dignity’ (4). The news was recorded by Mary on 31 March (Mary L i 141). In its celebration of an attack upon ‘the ancient 320dynasty of Spain’ (L i 272), the poem bears comparison with To the Republicans of North America (1812), especially the volcanic imagery of the third stanza of that poem which had been occasioned by S.’s belief that a republican revolution had taken place in Mexico (see headnote to no. 73). The poem's opening description of a revolutionary energy that echoes from ‘zone to zone’ may allude to the widely reported origins of the uprising in Cadiz in January 1820 in South America: ‘the seeds of rebellion and insubordination, which have been sown by secret agents from the revolted South Americans, have broken out in the army destined for that expedition’ (Galignani's Messenger (20 January 1820) 4).
