Leave it to a writer to pick up the ball of mixed metaphors and run with it. Geoffrey Chaucer of “The Canterbury Tales” fame noted that V-Day was the moment when “every bird cometh to choose his mate,” thereby forever linking the memory of a martyred priest with amore. In medieval Paris, a court would convene on St. Valentine’s Day to review marriage contracts, breaches and the cases of battered women.
By the Renaissance, Valentine’s Day was a well-established if not always happy tradition. The Bard, once again, weighed in, giving the mad Ophelia a bawdy, rueful ditty that reflects her torturous relationship with Hamlet.
Where was the heart in all this, literally as well as metaphorically? Well, it was also during the Renaissance that the French established the symbols used in the four card suits, with the heart – inspired not by an actual heart but perhaps by the intime portions of the female anatomy – representing the clergy as well as amour. At the end of the 18th century, some valentines were being printed though the vast majority were still homemade. A half-century later, the idea of mass-produced valentines took off and by the end of the 19th century, the heart motif as an embellishment for these cards – often accompanied by pudgy, naughty Cupid, the Greco-Roman god of love – was firmly in place.
Today the heart adorns schoolgirl notebooks, pictures of Justin Bieber, “I Love New York” T-shirts and the approximately 190 million valentines that are sent yearly in this country. Is the vital heart – broken, golden, young, achy-breaky, compared to a wheel and set on fire in countless songs – in danger of becoming trite?
Not really, not when you think of what it also symbolizes – courage, a word that shares its origins with “coeur,” the French for “heart,” from the Latin “cor.”
To have “heart,” as those struggling Washington Senators realize in “Damn Yankees,” is to buck up, even when it’s the final inning, as it surely was for the warriors captured by the Aztecs, whose still beating hearts were ripped from their bodies and sacrificed to the gods.
It takes courage to die. But it also takes courage to live and love. In Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” the little one-legged toy soldier remains true to himself and the paper ballerina he adores, through many tribulations. When at last he is thrown into a fire, his body melts but survives in the shape of a heart.
In other words, our hearts will go on.
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