Melancholy was seen as a physical complaint until quite recently. It’s slipped in the backdoor these days as a form of depression, but the older conceptions of it also incorporated “every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causes anguish, dulness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing frowardness in us, or a dislike.”
Yesterday is undoubtedly a melancholic song. Of the phrases above, quoted from Burton’s epic Anatomy of Melancholy, it probably encompasses sorrow, anguish and grief. Yesterday is a grief song, something was there and now its gone. You get the sense our protagonist knows it’s gone forever. There’s no sense of it coming back, which suggests grief. Perhaps anguish is a little strong. The song is quite resigned, “…now it looks as though they’re here to stay”. ‘Trouble’ is more accurate.
The Book of Disquiet by Pessoa:
“I’ve always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises. Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was, I’ve always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat. I was never convinced of what I believed in. I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through. Words were my only truth. When the right words were said, all was done; the rest of the sand that had always been.”
A similar resigned fate. And all wrapped up in dreams, the place where Macca first heard Yesterday. Belief is central to the song.
I believe in Yesteday. It’s gone. You can’t know it anymore.
It’s nostalgic melancholy. Nostalgia’s etymology is to the old greek for pain and going home. Home is this lover, and the pain is because the lover is yesterday, a place you can’t go anymore.
