Thomas Stanley – The Magnet
Every little kid has played with a magnet and a piece of iron. It is their attracting force, which we all know from our own experience, Thomas Stanley makes use of comparing it to the feelings between two lovers.
The poem The Magnet is a poem about love and physical attraction. The poetic speaker tries to convince the addressee to love him. However, in his poem Thomas Stanley refrains from writing a typical sonnet about this classic situation. In fact, in a poem of three sestets, he develops a witty, original argument in the first two stanzas making use of very unconventional, far-fetched metaphors that refer to natural phenomena and scientific knowledge. In the concluding third stanza, it becomes obvious what the poetic speaker, supposedly a young man, really wants: physical love.
It is characteristic of the metaphysical poets to link ideas and images with each other that have not been linked before. Instead of the common conceit of conventional metaphors the metaphysical artists choose the most estranging and surprising images and develop a compelling argumentation that leads to a conclusion in which concrete love and sex, not only romantic love and feelings, sometimes play an important role as well.