How are things in Glocca Morra this fine day?

This line is from the song “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” in the 1947 Broadway musical Finian’s Rainbow. The lyricist was E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, working with composer Burton Lane. In the show, the song expresses homesickness and romantic longing for an idealized Irish place—Glocca Morra is a fictional locale rather than a real town. The musical, a blend of fantasy and social satire, follows an Irishman who brings a leprechaun and a pot of gold to the United States; amid its comic plot, the song stands out as a tender, wistful interlude that became one of the score’s best-known standards.

The question “How are things in Glocca Morra this fine day?” functions less as a request for information than as an invocation of memory and desire. By addressing a distant, imagined homeland in conversational terms, the lyric turns nostalgia into something intimate and immediate, as if the speaker could speak across space to a place that embodies safety, innocence, and first love. The phrase “this fine day” heightens the bittersweet contrast between present circumstances and the idealized past. In the broader context of Harburg’s work, the line also exemplifies his gift for pairing plainspoken diction with emotional resonance, making yearning feel both ordinary and profound.