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As the Throe comes on, consciousness is not wholly extinguished. The speaker in these poems is alive to ‘Murder by degrees’, like a mouse in the teeth of a cat who will tease it before she ‘mashes it to death’. Part of this torture is the space for breath to ‘straighten’ and the brain to ‘bubble Cool’ before the kill re-starts. In another poem it’s as though the body is a house haunted by an ‘Assassin’ of the Brain, who prowls its corridors until the tormented Body ‘borrows a Revolver’ and prepares for a secret shoot-out behind a bolted door.

In the poems that recount the various stages of ‘Dying in the night’, the horror lies in the onset and aftermath. The Throe itself is brief - ‘The Maddest—quickest—by—’, and in its course the body sheds the flesh and becomes an immortal soul. A sign of divine favour, she would not wish to exchange this for what we call normality.

Afterwards, the brain sinks into a ‘Fog’. A dimness envelopes consciousness, she says, as mists obliterate a crag. In this state, the soul seems to abandon the body to a death-in-life she calls ‘Languor’ or ‘the Hour of Lead’. Languor and visions, Throe and art co-exist in ways understanding of the brain can’t, as yet, follow.

The Boston doctor and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes said in 1891: ‘If I wished to show a student the difficulties of getting at truth from medical experience, I would give him the history of epilepsy to read.’ The ancients called it ‘the sacred disease’ because of the visions, and the artist Raphael depicts the proximity of sick and sacred, the association of extreme other-ness, in The Transfiguration (1517): a boy with a swivelling eye undergoes a seizure while Jesus, in radiant light, hovers on high.

The oldest recorded idea (on a Babylonian tablet in c. 650 BC) is ‘possession’ - a demon to be driven out, indicated by an eye moving to the left and the jerking of the body. Hippocrates (c. 460-370 BC) resisted the supernatural when he deduced a physiological basis in the brain. In Julius Caesar it’s called ‘the falling sickness’, as Dickinson, a constant reader of Shakespeare, would have known:

CASCA: He fell down in the market-place, and foam’d at the mouth, and was speechless.

BRUTUS: ’Tis very like, he hath the falling sickness.

CASCA: . . . And so he fell. When he came to himself, again, he said, if he had done or said any thing amiss, he desir’d their worships to think it was his infirmity.

Shakespeare refers to the infirmity again when Iago goads Othello into the frenzy of jealousy. ‘My lord is fall’n into an epilepsy,’ Iago tells Cassius. Emily Dickinson pitied ‘the throe of Othello’.

Traditionally, epilepsy has carried a stigma. In the Middle Ages it was seen as a form of demonic possession and seizures played a part in convicting witches. In the nineteenth century, epileptics were sometimes incarcerated in asylums, and the more advanced asylums segregated them: too disturbing for the mentally ill. Females especially provoked genteel aversion as they broke the rules of ladylike control. Families therefore colluded to keep the condition a lifelong secret. Dickinson’s poetry speaks of a ‘reticent’ volcano: though its explosiveness would be relevant to her condition, the volcano’s still, temperate façade compels her imagination even more: the tremendous power of suppression ‘when upon a pain Titanic / Features keep their place—’. The Loaded Gun of her art has the deceptive stillness of a ‘Vesuvian face’.

In Emily’s youth the sickness was described in violent terms. The victim falls ‘as if hit by gunshot’, followed by ‘spasmodic throes’. These appear as if a creature, recently dead, were subjected to ‘the shocks of a galvanic battery’. A spark as to a ‘barrel of gunpowder’ will ‘induce the explosion’. Fingers are clenched and eyes, ‘suffused’ with moisture, swivel.

From her schooldays, when Emily was not well, she stayed for long periods in Boston with her Aunt Lavinia and little cousins Loo and Fanny Norcross. Between 4 and 22 September 1851, when Emily was twenty