"Inoculation" By Susan Donnelly

After I first read the poem, I did some research about Cotton Mather to find out the antecedent to the poem.  Cotton Mather was a reverend who was partly responsible along with Dr. Zabdiel Boylston for the first small pox inoculation in Boston, Massachusetts.  The slave that is mentioned, Onesimus, really was a slave to Mather.  Only because of Onesimus was Mather able to find out how to inoculate people.  At the time, experimentation on human kind was frowned upon by the Church and so was inoculation.  A word I did not know was providence.  It simply means divine guidance.  Going back to the poem, we now know that the antecedent is that Mather is talking to Onesimus about inoculation.  Because Onesimus already has had the disease, he cannot get it again.  The second stanza in the poem is talking about the antibodies that Onesimus has inside of his body.  They are part of the disease yet he still survives.  In the last stanza, I think Donnelly is making a commentary on slavery and how Onesimus is free of small pox but not of slavery, but I am not sure exactly how she is saying it.