Donne and Joyce on Meditation.

While studying James Joyce I found some words on how Stephen Dedalus experienced his torment of Hell in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In “The Meditative Structure of Joyceʼs Portrait” by Thomas F. Van Laan (Foundational Essays in James Joyce Studies, University Press of Florida, 2011, p. 141) we read that this meditation of Stephen Dedalus is also shown in Donne:

Louis Martz and Helen Gardner have shown the capacity of this pattern to influence secular literature, especially the work of John Donne and other poets who belong to what Martz has called the meditative tradition

This is what Donne said with the Edmund Spenser pseudonym (1) in The Faerie Queene (Proem Book I, st. 4):

4

And with them eke, O Goddesse heavenly bright,
   Mirror of grace and Majesty divine,
   Great Lady of the greatest Isle, whose light
   Like Phoebus lamp throughout the world do shine,
   Shed thy fair beams into my feeble eye,
   And raise my thoughts too humble and too vile,
   To think of that true glorious type of thine,
   The argument of mine afflicted style:
The which to hear, vouchsafe, O dearest dread a while.

That ʻto thinkʼ means “to medidate” on her, to put himself in a mental situation of contemplation, after the manner of Ignatius of Loyolaʼs Spiritual Exercises. It is the same meditation the mind of the poet talks about in his poem Daphnaida (stanza 5):

There came unto my Mind a troublous Thought,

…........................................................................

Which she conceived hath through Meditation

Of this Worldʼs Vainness, and Lifeʼs Wretchedness

It is the same meditation we read on the Irish localities in Book VII (Epilogue) of The Faerie Queene. Rudolf B. Gottfried writes on these mythical Irish localities in “Spenser and the Italian Myth of Locality” (Studies in Philology, Vol. 34, No. 2 [Apr., 1937]):

But most important, both tales use these local geographical forms as characters in myths of Spenserʼs own devising, a type which, for want of a better name, I shall term the myth of locality. And the boldness of the invention is here strengthened by the fact that the poet, while he calls the Mulla and Molanna nymphs, treats them and their lovers from first to last as the actual streams and Mole as the actual mountain; it is therefore impossible to visualize the story in any realistic sense … His myths of locality arise from happy meditation; they are experiences of the mind and fancy.

John Donne and James Joyce, those former Catholics using Loyolaʼs Spiritual Exercises for their own literature. (2)

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(1) Cf. Sex & Fun in The Faerie Queene (2019) and Ver, begin (2015).

(2) In The Eye of the Eagle: John Donne and the Legacy of Ignatius Loyola, by Francesca Bugliani Knox (Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern, 2011), we read that her thesis is this one: “The reading proposed here argues instead that Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises were for Donne a means to transcend the simplistic and perilous divisions of contemporary Catholicism and Protestantism.” And this is what Donne did with the Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe pseudonyms; cf. Thomas Nashe’s Marlowian language in that hellish meditation which is Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem (1593).