"Inoculation" Poetry Blog.

Inoculation
Cotton Mather studied small pox for a while,
instead of sin. Boston was rife with it.
Not being ill himself, thank Providence,
but one day asking his slave, Onesimus,
if he'd ever had the pox. To which Onesimus replied,
"Yes and No." Not insubordinate
or anything of the kind, but playful, or perhaps
musing as one saying to another:
"Consider how a man
can take inside all manner of disease
and still survive."
Then, graciously, when Mather asked again:
My mother bore me in the southern wild.
She scratched my skin and I got sick, but lived
to come here, free of smallpox, as your slave.
-Susan Donnelly

   First I looked up the terms I didn't know:
1) Cotton Mather- He was a New England Puritan minister in the late 1700s and early 1800s. He was a very important person both socially and politically; he was also very well educated.
2) Inoculation- taking a vaccine as a precaution against contracting a disease.
3) Onesimus- This is a biblical name for a slave that fled after robbing his master and was then religously converted.
   With this, the first two lines make more sense: Cotton Mather was a minister, but he studied small pox instead of "sin" for a while. He wasn't ill himself so he was researching the disease because so many others had it. He asked his slave Onesimus if he had ever had small pox. Onesimus says "yes" and "no." Technically, Onesimus had the pox when he was young, but he lived through it and in that way did not have the pox.
   The last stanza is in italics to emphasize what Onesimus is saying; he was born in the "wild," got deathly sick and survived, and then came to be Cotton Mather's slave. Instead of quotation marks in the previous stanzas, this one stands out gramatically and in meaning. It seems to be more than just an anwer to Mather's question, but an idea and his life story. He survived something major, but then became nothing more than a slave.
   As to the title, "Inoculation," it seems to just be referring to the medical need to get a vaccine to protect oneself from a disease like small pox. But, in this poem's time, there wasn't a vaccine for small pox, so maybe it's not a vaccine that one needs to protect from small pox, but something less material.