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Does ‘thorough’ imply a full-scale fit, as distinct from averted ones? It’s impossible to be certain because her words and grammar are undergoing transformation. Even that’s too weak for her purpose which is nothing less than transfiguration, as though the poet were inventing a sacred text. For the ideal outcome of ‘fit’ (a familiar noun transformed as a verb, infused with a verbal power to ‘do’) is to produce ‘a purer food’ (poetry) for readers’ souls. At the same time, there’s a calm acceptance that should she not succeed, she has still had the ‘transport of the Aim—’. Again, the final dash registers her leap beyond language into the lacunae of unknown modes of being.

And yet she never got over her fear of ‘it’ and in time her constant apprehension of ‘a Fitting’ turns out to be ‘terribler’ than when it’s on - when she’s ‘wearing it’. She was forty-three when she set this down in the first person; the fair copy shields ‘I’ with ‘we’:

While we were fearing it, it came—

But came with less of fear

Because that fearing it so long

Had almost made it fair—

There is a Fitting—a Dismay—

A Fitting—a Despair—

’Tis harder knowing it is Due

Than knowing it is Here.

The Trying on the Utmost

The Morning it is New

Is terribler than wearing it

A whole existence through—

On 4 February 1864 Emily and Vinnie returned to Amherst from Boston, following a consultation with New England’s foremost ophthalmologist, Henry Willard Williams, then in his mid-forties. He was a big man and a forcible speaker, the first to introduce a clinical course in ophthalmology in America and one of the first to use ether as surgeon to the City Hospital. In 1864 he founded the American Ophthalmic Society - another distinguished doctor. From April to November 1864 and for a similar period in 1865 Emily, aged thirty-three to thirty-four, spent the better part of two years in Boston for treatment of her eyes. Eyes? She never wore spectacles, and though she may have used Dr Williams’s (commonly prescribed) eye-wash, there is no other confirmatory sign of a disability grave enough to justify this level of disruption for a person who didn’t take kindly to leaving home. ‘Bereaved of all, I went abroad—’: death-in-life awaits her in the form of lodgings in a strange street. There’s no repose there, because ‘it’ goes with her, even when she takes sleeping draughts (‘Cups of artificial Drowse / To steep its shape away’):

I waked, to find it first awake—

I rose—It followed me—

I tried to drop it in the Crowd—

To lose it in the Sea—. . .

She stayed in a Cambridgeport boarding house with her orphaned cousins Loo and Fanny Norcross, and went for treatment to the doctor’s rooms at 15 Arlington Street near Boston’s public garden. But can eye treatment alone necessitate such prolonged stays in Boston, when the distance from Amherst was not so great as to prevent her father’s coming and going? Common sense suggests a major disability, and a concerted attempt at a cure.

Epileptics’ eyes are vulnerable to stimuli. During the aura they might see spider webs, thin clouds, spots, fiery circles or other premonitory signs. Charcot, the celebrated professor of the nervous system at the Salpêtrière in Paris, said that the visual abnormalities accompanying epilepsy are ‘like so many sphinxes’ defying anatomical investigation. Alternatively, a fit can start with a spot of blindness known as scotoma. A physician would shine his ophthalmoscope (developed during the 1850s, and newly in use for searching out diseases of the brain) into a dilated pupil in order to examine small blood vessels at the back of the eyeball, the only vessels visible without surgery. In 1865 Dr Williams won a prize for his treatise Recent Advances in Ophthalmic Science, announcing a new dawn of discoveries and cures, which Mr Dickinson bought for his library. Here, Williams investigates what he terms ‘hyperaesthesia of the retina’ (amongst a range of ills). He describes how contraction of