(Verse 2)
Suddenly
I'm not half the man I used to be
There's a shadow hanging over me
Oh, yesterday came suddenlyYesterday by The Beatles
What baffle me is the the line "Oh, yesterday came suddenly" it seems like a phrase without any sense, how can yesterday come? What came? The yesterday as a song? I mean the idea of writing this song? like he is saying the lyrics to the song yesterday just hit his head?
Is Paul trying to say the events that happened yesterday came very sudden?
The meaning of pop song lyrics is very often hard, or impossible, to state definitely. They can be like poetry, where the intention is to create a certain emotional effect, or the words can mean nothing at all.
When a moment, hour, day, etc, came 'suddenly' that could mean, I suppose, that previously the speaker felt happy or safe, and then was jolted out of that state by the event or events that occurred at that time. So maybe it's not so much 'yesterday' that came suddenly, but the events of yesterday that took him by surprise.
Worth noting:
Especially with 'musically led' songs (ones where the tune was written first and perhaps has a greater importance), the words can be very much a secondary thing and need not have any (or very much) meaning. This is very widely the case with pop songs. It may be pointless to try to work out exactly what they 'mean'. This may be considered a desirable feature, as it would tend to make the appeal as wide as possible.
As Paul recalled in 1968: "I couldn’t think of any words to it, so originally it was just, ‘Scrambled Egg.’ It was called ‘Scrambled Egg’ for a couple of months, until I thought of ‘Yesterday.’ And that’s it. True story"
John Lennon was unhappy about the lack of meaning in the lyrics:
But even with a complete set of lyrics, Paul’s songwriting partner, John Lennon, couldn’t get over a sense that ‘Yesterday’ was missing something.
... in 1980, he [Lennon] revealed the fundamental flaw in what is arguably Paul’s greatest contribution to The Beatles catalogue: "Paul wrote the lyrics to ‘Yesterday’," Lennon began. "Although the lyrics don’t resolve into any sense, they’re good lines. They certainly work, you know what I mean? They’re good, but if you read the whole song, it doesn’t say anything; you don’t know what happened."
it doesn’t say anything; you don’t know what happened is exactly why the song is such a success.
Commented
Feb 6, 2023 at 10:31
Unlike the other answers posted so far, I don’t read “yesterday came suddenly” as being about concrete events that happened yesterday. Instead, I’ve always interpreted it as
“My life has changed so drastically that ‘yesterday’ embodies the concept of a better time. I did not anticipate that this change would happen, so the existence of ‘yesterday’ with this meaning was a sudden occurrence.”
If you take into consideration there's nowhere to squeeze specifics such as "the day before yesterday", "yesterday morning", "yesterday evening" or "just after lunchtime yesterday" anywhere in the song, then you just use 'yesterday' as a dividing line.
At some point yesterday, his girlfriend left him. He's somewhat saddened by this turn of events.
That simple.
Yesterday
All my troubles seemed so far away
Now it looks as though they're here to stay
Oh, I believe in yesterday
He'd rather have 'yesterday morning' than 'yesterday afternoon at a little after half past three'.
Why she had to go? I don't know, she wouldn't say
I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday
He doesn't even know why she left. She apparently didn't tell him.
He wishes it were still 'yesterday', before this all happened. He was quite happy with the situation as he imagined it was and would continue to be.
Yesterday his girlfriend left him. He thought they had a good relationship, so this change caught him by surprise, and now he's devastated.
In the sentence you're having trouble understanding, "yesterday" refers to the event that took place yesterday, his girlfriend leaving. This is a form of synecdoche. "Came suddenly" means that there was no warning for this event (but I imagine that if you asked her, she'd say that the fact that he didn't recognize the problems was a part of the problem).
One possible interpretation that I think fits this context: yesterday used to be “today,” and became “yesterday” suddenly. The passage of time, which somehow takes him by surprise (another meaning of “came suddenly”), is making the narrator feel old and wistful.
Without knowing McCartney's intentions, my understanding as a native speaker was that "Yesterday" is metonymy standing for "the events of yesterday".
A similar example: if you have a busy December and don't have time to prepare presents, you could say: "It feels like Christmas Day came suddenly."
The question seems to be about the specific wording:
how can yesterday come?
The OP seems to keep coming back to that specific word choice in comments.
Without delving into the overall meaning of the song lyrics, the basic answer is that that's simply an English-language idiom. Tomorrow is coming / will come, today is here, and yesterday came. It expresses the progression of time. The implied metaphor is of time as a series of boxes, or train cars or similar, each one corresponding to one day, passing by in endless succession.
We also use the verb "arrive" similarly ("that day has arrived"), and we talk about days and time "passing".
Yes: the narrator is saying that yesterday's events came suddenly. I agree with Barmar that this line is an example of metonymy. (Synecdoche is a kind of metonymy.)
To understand what the narrator is saying in this line, it helps to look at the rest of the song. In every other verse, the narrator describes how he was happy yesterday, but he is sad now [see footnote]. Verse 2 sharpens this contrast.
In the first three lines of Verse 2, the narrator tells us that his change from happy to sad came suddenly. Suddenly, he felt smaller ("I'm not half the man I used to be"), and his life felt less sunny ("there's a shadow hanging over me"). In the last line, the narrator tells us again that the change came suddenly. This time, however, he uses "yesterday" to stand for the change that happened yesterday. That's the metonymy.
[Footnote] To describe the central theme of "Yesterday," I might use the words of another popular English-language song:
Now, this is a story all about how
My life got flipped—turned upside down
[...]
I got in one little fight and [she went away]
[Now I long for yesterday]
Here's my own interpretation:
There have been times in my life when some tragic event, often preventable (but not reversible), suddenly hits. The combination of it being preventable but not reversible is quite surreal. As a result, I find myself reliving that tragic moment, over and over, in my head. It happened such a short time ago -- hours, or even minutes ago -- yet I am powerless to change its course.
Even the following day I find myself thinking about the event, over and over and over. The 24-hour mark (a whole day since it occurred) hits especially hard. It's odd to think that 25 hours ago life was relatively good, and then one hour later everything suddenly irrevocably turns upside-down.
It's almost like I long to reminisce about the good times; however, these "good times" are not the times I experienced years ago, but simply the ones I experienced yesterday, before the tragic event transpired.
To me, this is what it feels like Paul McCartney is singing about. Just a few short 25 hours ago, life was beautiful and enjoyable. But then, something hit to make life veer off in an unwanted direction. And now, all I can do is helplessly reminisce about all that I lost since yesterday.
Paradoxically, even though grief hit me just a day ago, it feels like I've been grieving for a hundred years. And it's that very paradox that is what (it feels to me that) Paul is singing about: A hundred years of suffering and grief came suddenly -- not a century ago, but yesterday.
