Nohrnberg, suggesting that instead of pairing Tennyson's Columbus with his Ulysses in my paper, I might pair Ulysses with his Tithonus because of:

"the "solar" opposition between going East and going West and the meeting of the twain both in respect of aging and in certain interchangeable thematic and allusive echoes in the two poems. McLuhan once said that we're charging into the future with our eyes on the rear view mirror, and Frye replied that that's exactly the way it always works in travelling through time (as opposed to space), because the shape of things to come is precisely the consciousness and realization of the shape the past has taken when you are in the future and past it and are now seeing it for the first time in its final form. Is this relevant? I see the two poems as looking, superficially, as if they were placed in space, even while the reality is more like their being placed in time. We think we are faring forward, but in fact we are going in a circle; even if we keep facing in the same direction, we are not necessarily going in the same direction."

actually i should write back and tell him about pratchett, who does quite a bit on that theme, except in opposite terms. (if you aren't a pratchett reader, in his universe, trolls and humans conceive of time in opposite directions - the trolls believe we are moving forward through time with our backs to the future because what you can see is the present as it becomes past. so the humans and trolls are facing different ways while moving in the same direction.)

my small extension on the nohrnberg is simply that i expect most late renaissance navigation poems can be discussed this way too - because the point of sailing, before columbus and vasco de gama, is to go west. all you want is to reach the pillars of hercules, the western reaches of the world, but after the portuguese after you get out of the mediterranean you're still going west (from your point of view) in order to reach and then to round the cape, but once you do that you're going eastward.