Monday, February 28, 2011

Walt Whitman's "As I Watch'd the Ploughman Ploughing"

I think the short poem "As I Watch'd the Ploughman Ploughing" is a good example of the way that Walt Whitman incorporated spirituality and Christianity into his works. The poem is about him watching a person plowing a field and illustrating the symbols that this action and the results can correspond to life and life after death. He says that life is the tillage and death is the result of your labor.

This idea corresponds very well to the Christian idea that you reap what you sow in your afterlife. However, in a way it also seems to reflect the idea of Hinduism. In Hinduism people are constantly reincarnated back into life in a different form based upon the way that they lived their former life. For example, if you were a very good person you might be elevated to a higher part of the chain in your next life, but if you were evil in your life then you would be demoted lower onto the chain. That goes along better with the idea that is represented in the poem, which is the idea that you get out of life what you put into it.

In the Christian faith, while you do get rewarded in the afterlife for doing nice things during your life, the good deeds are not the means by which you actually get to said afterlife. The only way you can even make it to this final place is by believing in Jesus throughout your lifetime and striving to do your best because of that reason. In this way you cannot earn your way into heaven, but rather you get there by believing. Still though, once you get there you do in fact reap what you sow and get crowns of jewels and all kinds of lovely things for what you did right, according to the Bible.

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