The point of view in “Yesterday” is tricky. Someone—a “friend”—is lecturing the narrator, upset by the narrator’s behavior. What we get in the poem is the narrator’s retelling of the friend’s words; each time we read “he says” we’re getting the friend’s words retold by the narrator. It’s the same effect as someone saying in conversation, “A friend was yelling at me that I should have gone to the store yesterday, but I was too busy.” So lines like “even when I was living in the same city he says/maybe I would go there once/a month or maybe even less” are about the narrator, not the friend—the narrator was living in the same city, the narrator would go there once a month or less.

After this stanza, the perspective of the poem shifts. How does the friend know the intimate details of that last visit, what the father said, or that the narrator looked at his wristwatch? Did the narrator’s father tell the friend afterward, complaining to him about it? Or did the narrator tell the friend, after it happened? Or are we really hearing the narrator now, his own thoughts creeping in and filling in the outline of his friend’s information? Is the friend’s voice just an echo of the narrator’s own guilty feelings?

The narrator appears to be processing his last visit to his father, working it out. The poem ends on the friend’s final accusation, that the narrator cut his visit to his father short even though he had nothing else to do. The narrator does not reply, doesn’t defend himself or admit his guilt. We are left, like the friend, and maybe like the narrator himself, wondering why he did it.

Read a biography of the poet W. S. Merwin at the Poetry Foundation Web site.

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