heart

   In some contexts, ‘heart’ is a synonym for ‘inmost being, soul’, as in a sentence like: ‘He poured out his heart to her.’ ‘My heart’, therefore, used as a vocative to a loved one, is the equivalent of ‘my soul, my life’. ‘Do stop, Crystal, my darling, do stop crying, my heart,’ says a man to a woman in Iris Murdoch’s The Word Child. ‘Michael, my heart!’ are the final words of E.F. Benson’s Mike, as a woman declares her love for the hero. In Mariana, by Monica Dickens, it is a grandmother who says to her grand-daughter: ‘Enjoy yourself, my heart.’ Ngaio Marsh, in A Surfeit of Lampreys, has a husband who addresses his wife as ‘my darling heart’. ‘Dear heart’ is a frequently-used phrase of friendship or love, occurring in literature since Chaucer. It is used by a husband to his wife in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. In The Tempest Prospero wakens his Miranda by saying: ‘Awake, dear heart, awake; thou hast slept well.’ Shakespearean characters also address one another as ‘good heart’, ‘my profound heart’, ‘my little heart’, etc., and of course make use of ‘sweetheart’ (see also sweetheart). ‘Dear heart’ is still in use, though it has now a rather archaic or dialectal ring to it. It certainly seems to be quite natural when uttered by Hazel, the heroine of Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth, whose speech reflects her rural life in the Welsh marches.

   Since early times the heart has also been regarded as the seat of a person’s courage and spirit. We still speak of ‘not having the heart’ to do something or ‘putting heart into somebody’. This is the thought behind ‘my hearts’, addressed to a group of men, often by another man. ‘How now, my hearts,’ says a speaker in Twelfth Night (2:iii), a man addressing two other men. In later use this vocative became ‘my hearties’ and was especially associated with seafaring use.