Say What You Still See: Stasis and pastoral imagery in John Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' (1819) and Leigh Hunt's 'The Calendar of Nature [May]' (1819) by Nicholas Dunn-McAfee

This paper interrogates similar examples of stasis in pastoral imagery in John Keats’s poem ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and Leigh Hunt’s magazine column ‘The Calendar of Nature [May]’, both written in 1819 by the two most-prominent members of the ‘Cockney School’. In particular, the intention is to show that both the poem and the column being examined are united in a complex and nuanced deployment of static pastoral imagery that simultaneously raises the potential for inversion, mutability, and conclusion. While there is demonstrable tension between stasis and penultimacy haunting the short lyric poem and the journalism, both Keats and Hunt present the ‘sense of an ending’ as something that both emerges from – and maintains – stasis, rather than undermines it.