
Brian Doyle’s “Joyus Volardores”, is a piece that analyzes the inner workings of the heart and discusses how people can easily be affected emotionally and physically by what life throws at you. Using deep and expansive metaphors, Doyle is able to capture his ideas of how the heart affects the way we think and act. At first glance the piece may seem informative and absolute, but at a closer inspection one can discern that Doyle’s writing applies to life and how easily affected humans are by physical and emotional struggle. Doyle communicates the idea that people are fragile and thus life is short, mainly through the use of extensive metaphors, lists and a dark tone.

One of the ways in which Doyle communicates feelings of fragility towards humans is by using expansive metaphors. In Doyle’s discussion of how the hummingbird puts immense strain on it’s heart, he goes on to explain that this actually makes the hummingbird weaker. This is a metaphor that represents a human who overcommits oneself. Doyle is trying to say that as a person becomes obsessed with one task or goal, they progressively endanger themselves, making them more fragile. When Doyle writes: “The price of their ambition is a life closer to death”, he means that as people get more fixated on something, life becomes shorter (Doyle, 2). Those obsessed people are so focused on their goal, that they do not pay attention to the world around them and life as a whole will feel shorter. Doyle also uses metaphors to show how people are fragile by showing how easily people can be affected in a negative way. “You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard…as you possibly can, and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s glance, a child’s apple breath…” (Doyle, 3). This quote uses the metaphor of a brick wall as a measure of how emotionally disconnected someone may be. The higher the wall, the more distant and cold someone may seem. If you build walls around your heart this essentially means that you separate yourself from the people around you. However again Doyle explains that people are always breakable when it comes to emotions, the simple act of a woman’s glance or a naivety of a child may cause someone to experience a flood of emotions. However, putting up walls to keep out people around you are common human occurrences. This is because humans are fragile, we put up walls because we are not ready for others to come into our lives or we do so to push people out. This is because we cannot handle the emotional disturbances associated with letting these people into our lives and as a result we block them out. Thus making life shorter by having to be alone and isolated. Metaphors send a strong message in Doyle’s writing about the fragility of human beings, sometimes these metaphors can be found in the many lists that Doyle uses throughout the piece. 

Within “Joyus Volardores”, Doyle also uses repetition in the form of lists to convey the idea that people are fragile: “Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day in the Americas, bearded helmet-crests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs…” (Doyle, 2). By repeating a large amount of different kinds of hummingbirds, Doyle tries to make the reader feel upset and sympathetic at the thought of all of those different kinds of hummingbirds dying. Here Doyle is literally conveying his ideas by making the reader feel fragile and easily affected. Doyle also does this same exact technique when he lists the ways that our emotional stability could be broken down. “by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the words I have something to tell you…” (Doyle 3). By listing all of the many ways people can be emotionally distraught, Doyle can make the reader feel the emotions that he is trying to convey. In this scenario Doyle hopes to list several ideas to try and make someone feel upset or remind someone of an event that happened in their life that makes them feel sensitive. Doyle is trying to reiterate that building a wall over your heart will only make life quicker, he uses these examples to make people face the music so to speak. These examples, although some are horrible and real, and there is no point in trying to shut them out. It will only make life seem shorter. The lists that Doyle uses are key indicators of important metaphorical concepts regarding fragility within his piece. Doyle manages to take this a step further by highlighting these concepts by setting a dark tone. 

Doyle also uses a dark and very saddening tone in this piece that make the reader feel sensitive. When Doyle lists the many reasons that can cause someone’s defenses to crumble, one of the examples mentioned is: “a cat with a broken spine dragging itself in the forest to die” (Doyle, 3). The goal of this sentence is clearly to inflict a somber reader with the reader. Another example is “We are utterly open with no one In the end- not mother not father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart.” (Doyle, 3). In this quote, Doyle mentions a pessimistic and cold quote that essentially means we do not have any real heart to heart connections with others, there is only ourselves. Although as dark as this quote seems, Doyle actually means for it to console those who have lost connections with others, those who have lost the loves of their live and those who lost family members, where both feel that they cannot function without them. Doyle is trying to tell them that time will heal all wounds and that life will go on. This relates back to the shortness of life in that letting go of pain will help you function better and that dwelling in the past will only make life feel shorter.

By capturing the idea that people are fragile and life is short through the use of metaphors, lists and tone, Doyle is able to make his ideas clear in “Joyus Voladores” on his opinions on life. Overall, Doyle incorporates these ideas to the reader to help them prepare for the future, to make sure that they are ready to face the repercussions of having an overcommitted lifestyle, or horrible news, or a painful memory of the past. This piece serves to be an important lesson about balance, attitude and struggle while at first glance appears as a passage about the anatomy of animals. Doyle reminds us that living in the moment and accepting things as they really are can be challenging, but doing so leads to a well spent, successful life.