
The phrase “carpe diem”, when used to describe how to live life, reminds me of a cheap graphic of a sunset with some inspirational quote, to be posted on pinterest, and thought merely interesting and favorited. The true power of this term is completely ignored, but it does’t suggest any real-world examples,  just “seize the day.” However, Brian Doyle tells us in his speech “Joyas Volardores”, in order to live happier lives, we should slow down and pay attention to what’s in front of us, we need to continue to find meaning in life, and we should not bear our struggles alone. This is achieved through his use of sentence structure, vivid imagery, and contrast.

The hummingbird in this speech is used as a metaphor for the dangers of living life too quickly. Doyle begins the focus on the hummingbird’s heart, saying that it is “smaller than a pencil eraser”, that “beats ten times a second”, though the heart is “a lot of the hummingbird.” All of the examples given, along with repetition, create imagery of intense speed and beauty,  and create the first instance of the recurring focus on the physical heart. He then gives the audience more astounding facts about hummingbirds, saying they can “dive at sixty miles an hour” and “fly backwards”, though they require the energy from “a thousand flowers a day” in order to perform these feats. But without any energy, a hummingbird’s heart “retreats into torpor, their metabolic sleep rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate” and if they “do not find that which is sweet, they cease to be.” This point is not only sad emotionally because the natural beauty of the hummingbirds are lost, from a metaphorical perspective, Doyle is making a point about our need to find meaning in life. If we don’t have a purpose, a will to continue living, we won’t be able to get out of bed in the morning. We will perish like the “bearded helmet-crests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped wood nymphs”, and various other beautiful species of hummingbirds listed, “a brilliant music stilled.” 

Secondly, Doyle talks again of sad reality when he says that hummingbirds “have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms” in order to cope with insane amounts of stress hummingbirds cope with. Unfortunately, those measures inevitably fail; hummingbirds “suffer more heart attacks and and aneurisms and and ruptures than any living creature.” The sad part is that hummingbirds have a very short lifespan, as Doyle states that “every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime,” and a hummingbird spends those precious heartbeats quickly, and lives to be about two years old. The cost is high for both hummingbird and human, though in our case, we undergo extreme amounts of stress, loss of  sleep, no time to do anything fun, and we start to lose meaning in life. This life is not good, though we, unlike the hummingbird, have the ability to slow down. 

The whale, a much larger and slower creature is used to represent the glaring obvious that will be noticed when we slow down. Again, Doyle starts talking about a heart, but this time a  seven- ton whale heart, the latest heart on the world. He calls the heart “as big as a room”, then redefining the heart “[as] a room”, creating a sense of massive scale. Doyle then lists more large statistics of whales, saying the birth size of a whale is 20 feet and 4 tons, and that it “drinks a hundred gallons of milk every day from its mama, and gains two hundred pounds per day,” to further expand on the size of whales. He then goes on to say that “next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure… of the blue whale,” listing the various things that humans do not know about the creature with the largest heart on the planet. By contrast, we know a lot about the hummingbird, a creature with a tiny heart, and we are not up to par with Doyle’s standard of knowledge on whales. However, whales are known “to generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries…can be heart underwater for miles and miles.” The whales invite humans to explore the world around them, for much of your world is unknown, both from a scientific and social perspective. 

The final chapter contains the warning against callousness and fear of the exposure of the inner weakness, through the use of sentence structure, and dramatic shift in style from figurative to literal. The long sentences hack at our hearts relentlessly, reminding us of pain that we have felt. Our collective experience knows that “all hearts are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore.” Doyle states “we all churn inside,” as a way of expressing the pain and stress experienced daily as “we live in the house of the heart”, and “are utterly open with no one in the end”. However, Doyle’s redeeming message states that the pain is not entirely ours to bear. Yes, the responsibility is ours, but when hearts are “brick[ed] up as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can”, they “come down in an instant”. Here Doyle used descriptive imagery, like “a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die” , or “your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of our hair”, to shock the shattered human back to emotion. His final message is to not retreat into a glass fortress, because it will fail; instead be more open with others, and they can help shoulder the atlas of your struggles and worries. 

The focus on the hearts of the great, small, and hurting create a powerful emotional message that is crafted from the varied sentence structure: fast pace for the hummingbird, slower for the whale, and long and cutting for the human heart. The vivid imagery also contributes to the metaphors of decreasing the speed of life and truly taking in the surroundings, the need to continue finding meaning in life, and sharing in the struggle of life with others. Finally, contrast is used to convey the meaning of the whale’s metaphor in comparison to the tiny hummingbird, and also in the shift from figurative to literal language in the end. In summary, Doyle weaves a tapestry of inspirational life messages with repetition, contrast, and sentence structure, creating a relevant and memorable message that will hopefully be lived out. 
