
Imagine the size of a pencil eraser, then compare it to the vital organ that all creatures need to live. Then imagine a house and make that same comparison. A hummingbird, a spectacular animal, has a heart the size of a pencil eraser that beats ten times per second. A blue whale has a four-chambered heart like all mammals but, their hearts are so big a child can stand straight up and walk around in it. In Doyle’ “Joyas Volardores”, he tells about how life can seem so great at times but you never know when it can take a turn for the worst. In his writing, Doyle uses a style that smoothly steals the reader’s attention while going through the journey of life of different creatures.  With the use of his writing style Brian Doyle proves that no matter how small or big a heart can be can be, amazing things can be accomplished within life, to take advantage of life, and live it to its full protentional but life will eventually come to an end and sometimes be mysterious or not what it seems to be.

In the first paragraph Doyle starts with a hummingbird and how its heart is tiny but the bird itself has so much strength. He provides evidence of the strength of this stating “Each on visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death…” (Doyle 94).  This is evidence shows how anything can be accomplished with the right amount of strength and motivation.  By Doyle providing this information about hummingbirds as a reader you almost begin to praise and become more interested about the small animal. He does this by providing facts like “Each one visits a thousand flowers a day.” and “They can fly backwards” and telling of all the other magnificent things that hummingbirds can do. Just by reading this info its shocking, imaging trying to pick a thousand flowers let alone collect nectar from them. Doyle steals the attention of the reading and then tell about all the negative thing that happens in a hummingbird’s life.   He then goes from the happy and glorifying tone to the sad and depressed tone. He says “But when they rest they come close to death:”. With the entire mood of the text shift dramatically. He built up these magnificent birds just for them die off quickly.  Doyle shows how hummingbird live their lives to fullest and live on the brink of death when they dare to take a break.  This shows with the overcoming of adversity great things can achieve unimaginable goals.

Another topic of “Joyas Volardores” was the blue whale.  With this animal, Doyle somewhat made the same approach.  He starts by talking about how massive the heart of the blue whale is by saying “A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves” (Doyle 95).  By making this statement Doyle paints the picture in the reader’s head of the gigantic heart.  A heart you can walk inside of without bending down is unbelievable.  Again, Doyle details all of the amazing things like “When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons.  It is waaaaay bigger than your car. (Doyle 95).  Doyle exaggerate the number of the letter “A” in the quote to display his style and how amazingly big the blue whale’s heart is.  However, another shift is made with “…Next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs and arts of the blue whale” (Doyle 95).   By stating this Doyle again shifts the mood in the essay. The mood is shifted because the blue whale was spoken about greatly just because the size of the heart and then after all those facts were provided there was nothing more to talk about. For nothing else to be known about the life of a blue besides the size of its heart shows that in life there are things that you would only have to live through to actually know about some situations.  By doing this Doyle allows the reader imagination to explore and wander about all the amazing thing the blue whale is capable of attaining.

In the final paragraph, Doyle explains how the heart holds so much in a lifespan and continues to break it down into smaller sections.  Doyle says 

“When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by for of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall” 

In this quotation, Doyle is speaking about talking about love as a child and how it is not what children dream it to be but only come the realization one they get old enough.  He is saying that the dream of love becomes a reality of pain and hurt that will eventually fade away.  This is what Doyle was proving throughout his essay that adversity would have to be overcome to accomplish and experience great things in life.  With his concluding paragraph this where he really brings all his ideas together for how life is not always what it seems. He talks about how valuable the heart is and how it can take so much.  He explains how thing can be great but also get bad really quick.

In this essay, Doyle uses his writing style to his advantage by swiftly capturing the attention of the audience.  While in control of the attention of the audience he provides why life can great but it can also cause pain. Throughout the essay his style included anaphora which involve the repetition of phases to cement them in the reader’s mind.  Doyle also uses some extended sentences and includes words that are not necessary for his sentence structure which is why the sentences were so long.  For example, he says “Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolism” (Doyle 95). In this sentence, he is using more descriptive words that are not necessary but by using them he exaggerates how great the metabolism of the hummingbird is.

Therefore, Doyle gets his point across smoothly by using his style and techniques of exaggeration and feeding the audience of the good information before giving the bad.  He illustrates how life can be great and amazing but any minute anything could go wrong.  He basically describes how everything in life could be going right but could easily go left as well.  In Brian Doyle’s “Joyas Volardores”, he tells about how life can be so marvelous if you make it that way but something could happen at any minute to steal life or how some things are just unexplainable.  Doyle’s main point is that life is never what it seems and supports this argument by first making the life of a hummingbird seem elegant and carefree but takes an unexpected twist and shows the unfortunate side too.  He also does the same thing with the blue whale by glorifying its size and saying that it is one of the only things that’s known about the giant mammals.