Posterior, prophetic
Legal/theological term meaning 'coming after.' The bees' summer hum is replaced by something that comes later but still predicts—autumn insects foretelling winter.
lower metres
Musical term. Autumn's sounds are pitched lower than summer's—crickets versus bees, a descending scale through the seasons.
Genesis is June
Biblical structure inverted: this book of nature starts in June (Genesis) and ends in autumn (Revelations). Creation runs backward to apocalypse.
Reading Notes
The Year as Backward Bible
Dickinson structures the entire poem as an inverted biblical timeline. Genesis (creation, beginning) is placed in June—the height of summer when nature is most alive. Revelations (apocalypse, ending) arrives in autumn. This reversal is deliberate: she's describing nature's annual death as a kind of scripture you read backward, from creation to destruction.
The word "Aftermath" itself contains this idea—it's literally the second mowing of a field, the grass that grows after the main harvest is cut. In agricultural terms, it's what comes "after math" (the mowing). Dickinson uses it to mean the season that follows summer's main event.
"Posterior, prophetic" does double work. In theology and law, "posterior" means "coming after" (as in a posteriori knowledge—learned from experience). But these later sounds still prophesy—the autumn insects predict winter just as the bees predicted summer's end. Each season contains a forecast of the next.
What Replaces the Bees
Dickinson never names what makes the new murmuring. The "lower metres" suggests crickets or other autumn insects—their sound is pitched lower, slower, darker than bees. "Metres" works as both music (lower tones) and poetry (different rhythmic patterns).
The phrase "nature's laugh is done" is startling. She doesn't say nature's song or voice—she says its laughter. Summer was comic, light, a joke. Autumn is when the punchline lands and the laughter stops. The mood shifts from comedy to tragedy, from Genesis (comedy of creation) to Revelations (tragedy of endings).
Notice the poem contains no color, no visual imagery at all. It's entirely sonic—one sound stops, another starts. For Dickinson, who spent much of her life indoors, seasonal change often registered first as sound: what she could hear from her window before she could see it.