Every living creature has a heart. Every heart can only hold so much, bases on the creature that they are. People experience emotions every day, from love to hate. Sometimes there are too many emotions floating around in your head, so many emotions that they all start to tear you down. Through Brian Doyle’s, “Joyas Volardores” he uses figurative devices such as imagery, metaphors, and symbols in order to illustrate the overall theme of how many emotions a heart goes through, not only love and compassion but also anger and hatred, and how much it can hold in a lifetime. 

Throughout his essay, Doyle uses an extended metaphor to compare many things. He first compares the whale and the hummingbird but then compares animals to humans. He does this by wring an inductively reasoned essay. He gives his examples first of the animals then gets into his real point of humans. Humans hearts and animal hearts are closely related. The main difference is that humans have more going on in their life so they naturally have more emotions going through their hearts. The animal’s hearts are slightly less complex so that is why Doyle is able to symbolize humans with animals in the start of the essay.

Doyle uses an extended metaphor over the entire piece “Joyas Volardores” to show the relationship of animals and humans. He does this by simplifying humans down into animals because they are basic and their emotions are easier to think about. Doyle chooses to demonstrate this by the comparison of hearts. The repetition of the word heart helps the extended metaphor of humans and animals. It helps to show unity through both animals, big and small, and humans all having hearts. We are all the same in some way. Doyle uses this extended metaphor to compare humans and animals through their hearts. It illustrates that animals and humans are similar when it comes to their hearts. They both have one and have the ability to hold many emotions.

Imagery is the visually descriptive or figurative language, especially used in literary works. The imagery of the size of the hummingbird and whale’s hearts illustrates and contributes to the theme not only literally because of their actual size but also by how much they can hold emotionally. Doyle uses imagery in order to show the reader the sizes of the animal’s hearts. “A hummingbird’s heart is a lot of the humming bird” (Doyle 94). The hummingbirds heart is the “size of a pencil eraser” and it “beats ten times a second” (94). Their heart is so large compared to the size of its body. The hummingbird’s heart is not only to keep them alive but since it takes up such a large amount of their body, it symbolizes the size of how much their heart can hold emotionally. A whale’s heart, “…a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around in it, head high, bending only to step through the valves” (95), shows the imagery of a child walking around in their heart. This shows how massive a whale’s heart actually is. With the hummingbird and whale representing a human, the size of their hearts represents the amount of love and compassion that a human is capable of achieving.

Every animal and every human’s heart are not created the same, hummingbirds “hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours” (95). With their hearts being thinner and leaner it symbolizes that they have more flexibility than us as humans. The hummingbirds are able to do anything they want to do as long as they keep moving. As humans, we do not have as much flexibility as humming birds. We have to eat and sleep in order to function properly, which could take many hours in a person’s day. Also, many people have engagements that they must attend daily like school or work. This alone gives us the ability to not be as flexible. This symbol of the hummingbird’s heart being more flexible helps illustrates the theme of the emotions that the heart can hold by showing the flexibility that they have. 

In comparison to the hummingbird, a blue whale is an animal that has the largest heart in the world. "It weighs more than 7 tons" (95). Seven tons is many more times the size of the hummingbird. The size of their hearts does not affect the function of their body. With the whale being a larger animal their heart is automatically going to be larger. The whales heart does not take up the same proportion as the hummingbirds does. This represents the different people in the world. Not everyone has the same amount of compassion. This illustrates the theme because every human is not able to have the exact same amount of emotions in their heat but everybody is capable of holding at least some.

Everyone’s heart can hold a different number of things, but "so much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment" (96). This is the main point of Doyle’s essay. The heart holds any feelings someone or some animal might have. Feelings have to be let into the heart. If they keep being blocked out they will eventually fight enough, in order to get through and break anything that is in its way. The heart can feel many feeling like love and compassion but also hatred and sadness.

Doyle explains that “Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime” (95). He then explains that turtle’s hearts beat slower so it takes longer for them to reach the two billion beats so they are able to live longer. On the other side hummingbird’s hearts beat faster than humans can hear. The faster beats give the hummingbirds less time to live. This symbolizes that we should live our life to the fullest and not take any part of it for granted because we only have so many heart beats to live.

Through Brian Doyle’s “Joyas Volardores” we can learn a lot about human’s hearts. We can learn that size does not physically mater but it emotionally maters, but that it is beating and that we are alive. Doyle uses many symbols, metaphors, and imagery in order to illustrate his overall theme of “Joyas Volardores,” how much our heart can actually hold.
