Max M. answered • 03/14/19
Harvard Literature major with 20 years of coaching writers
Grammatically, the construction does not automatically imply either positive or negative. "A is no more X than B," says that A and B are equally X. That said, it is usually used to imply that neither has X quality, so I don't think he is definitely saying that the present is uncertain, because the sentence structure he's using is one that would commonly be used to imply that the future is certain (or in this case, not uncertain).
So that's the answer to the grammar question. As for poetry analysis, I think what Whitman is doing is creating cognitive dissonance. We take it for granted that the future is uncertain and the present is certain, but he's using syntax that implies that they're equal. So is the future certain or is the present uncertain? Whitman isn't answering that question; he's asking it, or rather, he's making us ask it. And if you look at the rest of the stanza, he's saying a bunch of things that make us question our assumptions: dead people change, kindness lasts longer than countries, everything we think we know is being challenged.
And so he's saying both that we know as much about the future as we do about the present, AND that we know as little about the present as we do about the future. Think about THAT for a while!
But here's another question: why are you posting without citation a question that was asked on another message board almost two years ago?
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/392530/what-is-this-strange-sentence-by-walt-whitman
