Innoculated
I found this poem rather interesting for a few reasons. First of all, and completely unrelated to the other reasons, is that this poem talks about Cotton Mather, and under normal circumstances, and with normal students, this wouldn’t mean anything, but to an abnormal student like me it has very strange implications. Cotton Mather, even though he was a famous reverend, made one of the first UFO sightings in American history. With this having been stated i can’t really take him seriously after learning this fact.
Because this poem has nothing to do with aliens, I digress. Something that impacted me was Onesimus’s quote, but part of what I have to say about it isn’t the deep realization of the theme that one would think. I think that Onesimus’s mom was right to have let him get sick, by being sick and by being in the wild and getting hurt we get all the bacteria in our system and get accustomed to them, this is something that has gotten lost in society these days. Everyone is such germaphobes, they are all carrying hand sanitizer, and not only is it on everyone’s person, but it is also everywhere you go and because of this, humanity isn’t as healthy as we think we are. Sure were killing 99.9% of germs but is that really helping us? I think not, and that is why so many people get sick, because we try so hard to keep from getting sick. That is just too ironic, but there is something in this poem that is also very ironic, and that is the last part of Onesimus’s quote, when he says that he came to Cotton, free of smallpox, but as a slave. It’s ironic that while he is free of the disease that is killing so many people, he is still locked under the chains of slavery, and is that really so great? To be alive yet enslaved? If you are enslaved against your will, you lose a part of yourself and you aren’t truly alive anymore, not until you gain your freedom. And this is what I feel the author is trying to say, that is it worth being free of smallpox, or any other illness or malady, if you’re just going to live a life of entrapment and slavery?
I think that that is a truly tough question.