Dickinson imagined two lovers reunited only at the Last Judgment
Two lovers, separated for a lifetime, finally meet again before God's judgment seat, stripped of their bodies. Dickinson turns the most terrifying scene in Christian imagination into a wedding, with angels demoted to polite guests. It is one of her boldest attempts to write romance across the border of death.
The first stanza sets the scene with almost bureaucratic calm. The parting was long, but the appointment, which she calls an Interview, has at last arrived before the Judgment Seat. It is only the second time the pair have met, and the last. The poem never explains what kept them apart, which leaves the reader to supply the story of a love that could not be lived on earth.
Then the tone lifts. These "Fleshless Lovers" find a heaven in a single gaze, and a heaven of heavens in the privilege of looking at each other. The third stanza says no lifetime weighs on them now; dressed like the newly unborn, they are born again into something larger. Dickinson bends grammar here, inventing the comparative infiniter so that even infinity can grow.
The closing stanza asks whether any wedding was ever like this one. Paradise itself hosts the ceremony, and the cherubim and seraphim, the highest orders of angels, attend only as the unobtrusive guest. The judgment that should be the climax of the scene is quietly sidelined by a look between two people.
Mortality runs through her poetry, and it ran through her surroundings. When Dickinson was about nine, her father bought a large house on North Pleasant Street in Amherst that overlooked the town's burial ground, which a local minister described as treeless and forbidding. The family's roots in the town went deep: her grandfather Samuel Dickinson, a founder of Amherst College, had built the Homestead on the main street in 1813, and it anchored family life for most of a century. Emily was born there on December 10, 1830.
Source: 'Twas a long Parting -- but the time
