Somewhere over the rainbow
Bluebirds fly.
Birds fly over the rainbow—
Why then, oh why can’t I?

These lines are from the song “Over the Rainbow,” with lyrics by E. Y. (Edgar Yipsel) Harburg and music by Harold Arlen, written for the 1939 MGM film The Wizard of Oz. In the film, Judy Garland (as Dorothy Gale) sings it early on in Kansas as an expression of longing for a life beyond her immediate hardships and constraints. Harburg, known for socially conscious writing during the Depression era, framed Dorothy’s private wish in simple, childlike imagery—rainbows and bluebirds—while the film’s narrative later literalizes the journey to an “elsewhere” (Oz) that tests and refines that yearning.

The stanza contrasts the effortless freedom of nature (“Bluebirds fly”) with the speaker’s human limitation and frustration (“Why then, oh why can’t I?”). The rainbow functions as a symbolic boundary between the ordinary world and an imagined realm where desires are fulfilled and burdens lifted. The rhetorical question turns wonder into ache: if the world contains beauty and possibility, why is the speaker barred from it? In The Wizard of Oz, the line also foreshadows Dorothy’s arc—her longing for escape propels the story, yet the eventual lesson complicates the fantasy of “somewhere” by returning value to home and inner resources.