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.)
Where this text comes from
First published in Leaves of Grass (Washington, 1871). Located in this edition by matching this text's lines against the 1871 scan. The corpus text follows the 1891–92 arrangement, by which the poem had been revised. First located printing is this volume; an earlier periodical printing has not been established. [1]
Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-12.
Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/walt-whitman_leaves-of-grass, whispers-of-heavenly-death.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).
Earlier sources (2)
This poem as JSON or plain text . Line anchors #L1–#L4.
Cite this poem
Walt Whitman (1819–1892).
“As I Watch’d the Ploughman Ploughing.” First published in Leaves of Grass (Washington, 1871).
Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/as-i-watchd-the-ploughman-ploughing/.
Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.
More by Walt Whitman