Sonnets, invented by the Sicilian poet Giacomo Da Lentini around the middle of the thirteenth century and popularized by Petrarch in the fourteenth century, have attracted poets ever since as a form adept for the concentrated and musical expression of love. Giacomo’s interest in Courtly Love quickly expanded among other poets to romantic love more generally, and sonnets and sonnet sequences spread geographically and topically to address all sorts of love, including friendship, love of country or place, and Divine love.
The Streets of Harmon Falls expresses love of place: a small, Midwestern town like so many other small towns but dear to the narrator for its inhabitants, institutions, and topographical beauty. By no means a perfect place of perfect human beings, Harmon Falls remains a significant part of the narrator’s past and so of his present: a large part of who were are comes from where we were born, with whom we grew up, and how family, friends, neighbors, and place shaped us. Towns change, and so do we; Harmon Falls, as it was and is, welcomes you.
