Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Marie Howe’s "Yesterday" is a brief but deeply poignant meditation on memory, loss, and perhaps even the illusions of time. The poem is structured around a moment of realization—“Now that it’s happened, it seems it had to happen”—which suggests an event both inevitable and disorienting. The speaker recounts an ordinary autumn afternoon, marking the time and date precisely, as if trying to anchor herself in reality. Yet, by the poem’s close, time itself seems unstable, and memory reveals its unreliable nature.

The poem opens with the specificity of "three days after my forty-fifth birthday," which sets a personal, reflective tone. The "mild October afternoon" creates a gentle atmosphere, a moment of stillness that contrasts with the speaker’s underlying tension. The repetition of "somewhere around five o’clock" and "the seventh or eighth time I’d gone to check" suggests a habitual action, an obsessive return to something that is no longer there. The act of checking implies a search, an anticipation, or even a reluctance to accept reality.

The middle of the poem shifts into a dreamlike space: “Still the house had built itself a corridor I’d been hurrying through towards the sleeping child.” The image of the house creating a corridor suggests that memory itself is shaping the speaker’s reality, as if leading her toward something she believes to be true. The mention of "Sarah’s angel" and "Sarah’s laugh" introduces another presence, possibly a reference to a biblical figure, a lost loved one, or an old friend whose voice lingers in memory.

But the final lines pull the speaker—and the reader—into a stark moment of revelation. The "white curtains billowed slightly in the mild, October wind," an image that evokes both peace and absence. Then the last devastating statement: “but there was no baby, and hadn’t been.” This sudden reversal forces the reader to reevaluate everything that came before. The speaker’s repeated checking was not just an act of care but of longing. The memory of a child—perhaps one lost, perhaps one imagined—has shaped her movements, only for her to realize that it was never real in the first place.

The poem, in its brevity, captures a profound sense of grief, disorientation, and the way the mind constructs realities to fill absence. The act of searching, the familiar setting, the wind through the curtains—all suggest an ongoing dialogue between past and present, between what is real and what we wish to be real. In the end, "Yesterday" is a meditation on time and memory, a quiet recognition of how the mind struggles to reconcile loss, even when there was nothing there to lose.

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