Click on the link below to hear So Here We Are on Miporadio. Please give time for the link to download. So Here We Are: Poetic Letters From England I first walked along the Euston Road, London NW1, in September 1973, on the way to King’s Cross St Pancras, one hundred years after Arthur Rimbaud had lived in and around the area. Here he wrote most of those extraordinary prose poems, Illuminations that transform and allow the reader to see anew. They are filled with bridges, arches and railway lines, as the area is today. It is a fascinating place, layered with literary ghosts. W.B. Yeats lived and wrote at Woburn Walk, from February 1896 to June 1918, and was also involved in an alchemy of the past and future. There is a sense of magnetic attraction to this area that goes back to before William Blake’s Jerusalem (1804-20) mapped a landscape pointing to St Pancras Old Church and the fields north of the Euston Road as pivotal. The fields from Islington to Marybone To Primrose Hill and Saint John’s Wood Were builded over pillars of gold And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood Here Little-ones ran on the fields, The Lamb of God among them seen, And fair Jerusalem his Bride Among the little meadows green. The area and church is named after the Roman boy-martyr executed by Emperor Diocletian in 304 AD. Pancras became a favourite saint in England. Indeed we have a Saxon village here in Dorset named Alton Pancras and its nearby Church Hill. Founded in 314 AD, the Old Church is regarded as one of the oldest in Europe and, with Glastonbury Abbey, the oldest in England. It was built on Caesar’s encampment at Pancras called the Brill. This conjecture by the Chief Druid and Antiquarian, Dr. William Stukeley, from his digging in 1750, would have been known to Blake, and was later confirmed by the discovery of Roman bones in 1863 by the Midland Railway Company. This emphasis on field archaeology and the discovery of ancient materials certainly fuelled the late Victorian fascination with the occult and lay behind some of Rimbaud and Yeats’ work. Fieldwork has subsequently inspired such poets as Seamus Heaney (Field Work 1979) and Peter Riley (Alstonefield 2003, Excavations 2004) in more diverse ways. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘field-work’ is derived from the ‘field-work’ of 1767, which related to surveying, and that of 1777 when it was first used in connection with agricultural fieldwork. Literary references to ‘Pangrace’ as it was known, include the satirists George Wither, Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, where it is cited as a place of great sanctity, and the contemporary satirist, Iain Sinclair, who championed Aidan Andrew Dun’s epic poem, Vale Royal (1995), on the subject. In 1865 Thomas Hardy, working as an apprentice architect, supervised the disinterment and removal of coffins to make way for the Midland Railway cutting. These included those of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, who were removed to lie with their daughter, Mary Shelley, at St Peter’s in Bournemouth. During June 1814 Percy Bysshe Shelley had secretly courted Mary Godwin, reading sections of his poem, Queen Mab (1813), by her mother’s grave, and her stepsister Jane ‘Claire’ Claremont. This was the place where Mary had gone since early childhood to escape from her stepmother and where allegedly the boy-poet, Thomas Chatterton, had fallen in an open grave a few days before his death in 1770. Whilst the Old Church was home to radical Dissenters, such as Mary’s parents, it was also the place of worship for Catholic émigrés escaping the French Revolution. Church records show a great many members of the extended Blake family using the church but no reference to William, who was involved in the New Jerusalem Church of Swedenborgians elsewhere. Hardy was imbued by the place, reading Queen Mab and writing several poems about his experiences at St Pancras Old Church, including ‘Neutral Tones’ and ‘The Levelled Churchyard’. The Hardy Tree growing within the old g