Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“The future is no more uncertain than the present.”
- Source
- Song of the Broad-Axe
- Date
- 1882
Meaning of “The future is no more uncertain than the…”
Whitman refuses to treat the future as uniquely unknowable: within the poem's larger meditation on what endures, present conditions are themselves unstable and changing, so uncertainty belongs to both horizons.
Where does it come from?
Leaves of Grass (1882), “Song of the Broad-Axe,” section 4; Wikisource 1882 transcription. The line appears after “And the dead advance as much as the living advance” and before Whitman turns from institutions and structures toward the personal qualities he says endure.
