Four lowercase lines with no punctuation, and the poem still manages to knock the reader off balance. Its title, "Seizure," gives a clinical name to what the first line calls, much more casually, "having a fit." The poem is about the moment when a mind is taken over and narrowed down until almost nothing is left of it. The speaker doesn't describe the experience from outside, as a doctor or a bystander would. The poem stays inside it, and the central idea is that a seizure is a violent shrinking of the self, from a person with a whole garden around them to a creature pressed against a single stone.
The first line is deliberately plain. "Having a fit" is everyday speech, the phrase we use for tantrums and giggles as well as illness, and the poem leaves it open. The title steers us toward a medical reading, but the line itself doesn't insist on one. The participle "having" also arrives with no subject, as if the event begins before the "I" can be established. Only in the next line does "my" appear, almost too late. The setting matters too. A garden is cultivated, orderly, a place we associate with calm, so the fit seems all the more out of place in it.
The second and third lines carry the poem's strangest and best move. "My whole mind against / one stone." The line break after "against" leaves the preposition hanging, so for a moment we don't know whether the mind is leaning on the stone, colliding with it or opposed to it. Then "one stone" arrives alone on its own short line, as hard and isolated as the thing it names. Look at the arithmetic of the phrase: "whole" set against "one." An entire mind is measured against a single small object, and the mind loses. The echo between "whole" and "stone" ties the two together, as if the mind has been fixed to the stone's sound as well as its position. Stone is also the opposite of a fit, since it is still, heavy and indifferent. The body convulses while attention locks onto the one thing that cannot move.
Then the poem turns, without warning or explanation: "a rabbit at the fire." There is no verb and no "like" to tell us how this connects to what came before. Readers have to build the bridge themselves. Perhaps the rabbit is the speaker seen from outside, small and frozen, a prey animal caught in a moment it can't escape. A rabbit's stillness when threatened is a kind of paralysis, which suits the poem. "Fire" is open as well. It could be a hearth, which would move us indoors and into the aftermath, or the flare of a mind misfiring. Judging by the imagery, the poem seems to want both domestic safety and danger in that one word. The rabbit belongs in a garden, yet it appears at the fire, which suggests that the scene has been uprooted and the speaker's sense of place has slipped.
The shape of the poem supports all this. The lines shrink, from about eight syllables to five, then to two, before swelling again to six. The squeeze down to "one stone" imitates the narrowing of attention, and the last line springs back into a different world. There is no rhyme, and the poem doesn't need it, but the sound is far from loose. The hard, clipped t's in "fit," "against," "stone," "rabbit" and "at" give the lines a jerky, stop-start quality, as though the language itself were twitching. The missing punctuation also means nothing pauses or gives the reader a place to rest, apart from the breaks the lines force on us.
What makes the poem significant is how much it gets from how little it says. It never explains the seizure, apologises for it or turns it into a lesson. The title supplies the label, and the poem supplies the sensation: a mind reduced to a point, then a flash of animal helplessness. It treats an experience that often defeats description and finds images small enough to hold it. For a student, it shows how a very short poem can work by compression, putting two images next to each other and trusting the reader to feel the space between them.