This poem by Walt Whitman is an extremely short one. Seriously, it's only four lines long.
"As I Watch'd the Ploughman Ploughing,
or the sower sowing in the fields- or the harvester harvesting
I saw there too, O life and death, your analogies:
(Life, life is the tillage, and Death is the harvest according.)"
At first glance, it seems like Whitman is simply alluding to the circle of life, because of his mention of Death being the harvester and the analogies of life and death. Whitman sees life as tillage, meaning that life is overturned and broken up, and does not always go smoothly. This poem seems fairly simple at first, because it just seems like Whitman is describing the way he sees the circle of life and is relating it to common aspects of the every day life of the time period.
When you go deeper into the poem to analyze it, more things come forward and sort of change the meaning and the purpose of the poem. Christianity can be brought into it when you think of the ploughman, sower, and harvester as the Holy Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). The way I see it, Jesus could be the ploughman, getting people ready to receive the word of God. And then God could be the sower, giving people His word. The Holy Spirit would then be the harvester, because most Christians believe that after you die, your soul is taken up to heaven by the Holy Spirit (unless you're going in the other direction, of course- but that's really your problem if that's so).
Personally, I think that Whitman really was relating the poem back to Christianity and God when he wrote "As I Watch'd the Ploughman Ploughing", because of the way he ties every single thing he writes about back to "Self" and to religion as well. Basically, I think the main point of this poem was for Whitman to show people how God and religion connects back to the mundane aspects of everyday life.
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