Shelley’s local monster

1614 pamphlet documenting dragon sightings near Horsham

Theresa Gooda considers Shelley's well documented preoccupation with magic, myth and monsters and their connection to his West Sussex roots.

In his famous essay A Defence of Poetry, Shelley conflated poetry itself with the magic of alchemy in its transformative capacity:

Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.

Myths too, inform much of his writing. Shelley’s elegy for Keats, Adonais (1821) draws on the myth of Adonis. Alastor (1815) evokes the myth of Narcissus. The Witch of Atlas (1820) inhabits a cave in the mythical Atlas mountains and uses ‘strange art’. Shelley variously brings night, clouds, autumn, and wind to life as spirits or deities. And many of his poems are populated by strange creatures and beasts.

Several of Shelley’s biographers attribute the fascination with beasts to the poet’s early years at Field Place in Sussex. Richard Holmes begins Shelley The Pursuit (1974) with what Shelley could see from his bedroom window, and how those early views and influences kick started imaginative pathways:

In Warnham Pond there lived the Great Tortoise. Sometimes at night it rose out of the depth of the water and came trundling over the lawns. In the woods there was another monster, the Great Snake. He talked to his nurse about it. She said it lived in St Leonard’s Forest and was at least three hundred years old (p1).

Edmund Blunden in Shelley, A Life Story (1948) also argues that the appearance of magical creatures in his works was fueled by local legend:

Shelley must have heard people talk of the local dragon of St Leonard's Forest, that lovely woodland with its water-lily pools and lilies of the valley which he knew well and which in part would one day be his; probably his monsters were relatives of that one (p24).

Legend has it that St Leonard's Dragon was killed in the 6th century. Yet, according to a 1614 pamphlet documenting more recent sightings, the creature was alive and well -less than 200 years before Shelley was born.