Yesterday
By
The Beatles
|
Analysis
Ø Background
This is a song which was
composed by The Beatles in 1965 for their album Help!. It was credited to Lennon-Mc Cartney. It is a song which
tells us about the break-up of a relationship, and it is delivered in an
accoustic-romantical way.
There
are some poetical expressions which are going to be discussed. They are the
repeated words, the simple words, the emotive words, and the figure of speech.
These items are the important thing to be discussed to measure the quality of
this song.
Ø Repeated Words
According to Wikipedia, repeated word in poetry is a
word which is grouped as a psychological phenomenon. Because of this
phenomenon, it causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose the meaning for the
listener since the word is repeated as meaningless sounds.
In this text, Yesterday has some repeated words. The
highlight of this repeated words is focused on the word “Yesterday”, since the
title of this text is also “Yesterday”. There are some reasons which we can get
from this : it could be the writer wanted to emphasize the meaning of
“Yesterday” itself in this song, or wanted the song is well-known as
“Yesterday” song. Besides the word “yesterday”, there is also a stanza :
Why she had to go
I don't know she wouldn't say.
I said something wrong,
Now I long for yesterday.
I don't know she wouldn't say.
I said something wrong,
Now I long for yesterday.
Which are repeated until
twice in this lyric. It emphasized that the author is asking the reason why the
person left him behind without words.
There is also one stanza which repeated twice
through this song :
Yesterday,
love was such an easy game to play.
Now I need a place to hide away.
Oh, I believe in yesterday.
Now I need a place to hide away.
Oh, I believe in yesterday.
This part is the beginning of the main
problem. It tells a story from this lyric. While the previous stanza we talk
about is the climax of this lyric.
Some advantages we can get from the repeated
words are :
1. It can make the song catagorized as
“easy-to-listen” song.
2. The emphasized meaning from the author
of the text can be distributed to listener easily.
3.
Because of the repeated
words which are concluded in the text, it makes the lyric become famous.
While some disadvantages are :
1. Those repeated stanza makes the lyric
longer than the one without repeated stanza.
2. The quality of romantic song is not that
high.
Ø Simple Words
Simple word is words which are simple
and not complicated one. The words in this song’s lyric above are
so simple. It
is like the word “Nice to meet you” or “I am happy”, which indicates simple
meaning. Those are using the words we usually used in our daily
conversation like : yesterday, love, go, suddenly, say, wrong, hide. I think
there is no difficult word to understand and everybody can know the main idea
directly when they read or hear this song once only.
Ø Emotive Words
The emotive words which show
about some feelings in the text are not in a dennotative way, but in
connotative.
1.
In the sentences “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far
away”, we can coclude that in the past, all the troubles of the author (a
composser, for this text) were easy to be solved. The word “easy to be solved”
here is replaced by the words “seemed so far away”.
2.
The word “Suddenly” and sentence “I'm
not half the man I used to be”. These lyrics mean that the author is in the
broken heart feeling, in a disappointing & regretting time, in the very
hard situation to bear down his feeling, his love. He disliked with that
situation, because he used to be in pairs with his girl, but now it doesn’t
happened with him anymore.
Ø Figures of
Speech
This
song used some figurative language to express the writers emotion.
-
Love was
such an easy game to play = Simile (the word “such” indicates simile)
-
Now it
looks as though they're here to stay = Simile and
Personification. The word “as” shows simile. While the words “they” stands
for the writer’s problems. We all know that problems is not a human or animated
object, but an inanimate object. So, they here can not do a work (stay) and it
called personification.
-
There's a
shadow hanging over me = Personification, because a shadow can not hanging over us.
Ø Advantages of The Lyric
1.
We can know about the implicit meaning
(we know well about a condition when we have to split up with our couple). Using
the sentences in this lyric, we can tell how the feeling of sadness,
disappointed, regret, and painful.
2.
This text can be a reference for us to
present a condition (like sadness, regret, etc.) in a connotative way.
3.
This text learns us about the meaning of
life. Here, we know that in life, there are not only happiness but also sadness
occurs. Every journey of love, it doesn’t always have happy ending. There are
also times when we get into a break-up. So, it can change our perception that
life is not always easy, times to up and down are always existing.
