Joyas Voladores is a short text written by Brian Doyle. In this text, Doyle writes about the hummingbird and the bird’s different abilities and anatomy. At surface level, the text appears to be about the unique bird’s anatomy and abilities. However, there is a deeper meaning behind all of this anatomical information. The author of Joyas Voladores, Brian Doyle, uses quite a few literary devices to get the reader’s attention and to hopefully see this deeper meaning. By looking at a few, such as diction, repetition, and juxtaposition, the audience is aided in seeing this message behind the text other than the anatomy and functions of a heart. This is important for the reader to notice because they are allowed to think more about the text and find these meanings on their own. A large message the author is trying to convey to the reader is size does not relate to strength, and the literary devices used in the passage absolutely help to display the message to the reader.

The author’s use of diction in Joyas Voladores allows the reader to explore the deeper meaning behind the text. Generally, whenever diction is used in a passage, often times the purpose is to attract the audience’s attention and to create a certain image for them with the particular words being used. In the text the author states, “More than three hundred species of them whirring zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones” (Doyle 94). The quote extracted from the text describes hummingbirds and the way they move around. The author easily could have used a banal word such as “flying” to describe how the hummingbird travels from place to place, but instead he chose to use words to would aid the reader in picturing just how fast a hummingbird can fly. By using words such as “whirring” and “zooming” it is easy for the reader to picture the hummingbird speedily moving from place to place. Now, had the author just used a simple boring word such as “flying”, the reader would not think much of this creature, the hummingbird. However, because of Doyle’s intentional carefully chosen word choice, the hummingbird appears to be a creature of great speed and strength. The author is using diction in order to display to his audience that size and strength do not always show correlation.

The use of repetition in Joyas Voladores helps the author to communicate the essay’s deeper meaning to the reader by repeating specific words or phrases. Typically, when an author uses repetition throughout their text, they are doing so to catch their readers’ attention. The author states, “They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest” (Doyle 95). Doyle catches the attention of his audience in this particular quote pulled from the text by repeating the phrase “They can” three times. The author repeats this phrase over and over to engrave the importance of what the hummingbird can do into his audience’s mind. He is trying to convey the idea of hummingbirds, which is what he is referring to as “they”, doing remarkably impressive things despite having physically the world’s smallest heart. Once the reader notices the use of repetition, it is easier to identify the deeper meaning here, which is the possibility to do big things, despite one’s size.

Cleverly, Doyle uses juxtaposition as another literary device to help the reader understand the text’s deeper meaning. There is a plethora of examples of juxtaposition throughout the text. In the passage, the author states, “Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms” (Doyle 95). In this particular quote from Joyas Voladores, the author is using juxtaposition when using the words “incredible” “enormous” “immense” and “ferocious” to describe the hummingbird’s metabolism. The hummingbird itself is already a small creature, and the metabolism is an even smaller part of the bird. There is an obvious contrast between the words used in the quote which all basically mean “large” and the small creature’s, metabolism. This contrast is vital in helping the author to bring about his deeper message to the attention of his audience. By using words usually used to describe things of a larger size, it is made easier for the reader to be able to see the author’s message of size not always relating to overall strength. 

Throughout Joyas Voladores, many literary devices are used by the author to catch the attention of the reader. The author’s purpose for using these different devices is to help his audience to understand the larger message hidden in the text. Doyle talks a lot about the hummingbird and the anatomy of it throughout his work and in doing so he is conveying the deeper message of just because one is physically small, does not mean they cannot do great things. Overall, the use of diction, repetition, and juxtaposition unquestionably served the purpose it needed to of aiding the author in conveying this deeper message to his audience.