Sadie Hinton

Professor Smith

English 101

December 1st 2016

Joyas Volardores Close Reading

An author can use the title, form, and patterns of a piece just to portray one meaning. Brian Doyle, author of Joyas Volardores, wrote this extensive poem in prose to convey his views of human life in relation to animals in a way that humans will never be able to understand these animals and their own lives as well. Because of Doyle’s vast knowledge of nature, he chose to use it as an easy outlet to get his point across. By doing this he is able to help the reader understand, to an extent, what the life of that animal consists of. Human beings have a slight understanding of animals and nature to begin with so they are capable of following correctly but still cannot fully immerse themselves in the idea of what he is explaining because they aren’t these animals. With that he is conveying that although we know some about our lives, as long as we are alive we will never truly understand what the after-life consists of. By using the title and brief descriptions of two different animals, Doyle shows us a metaphor for the unknowing of death.

Even outside of the writing Doyle is trying to relay the thought of this unknowing. He decided to title it Joyas Volardores which he explains means “flying jewels” (Doyle 94) when referring to the first sight of birds like the hummingbirds Doyle mentions thoroughly. It seems as though he thoughtfully chose to title this poem for two reasons. When the reader first reads this title, most won’t understand what it means which in essence is what he is saying about these other animals and life as a whole. He also touches on the fact that this name was first from the first white explorers. These explorers had zero understanding of these animals, even less than we do now. This also relates back to the message that we only are able to try to understand from what we’re seeing but beyond that we will never actually get it just like when these explorers named these flying jewels.

The first of the two animals Doyle introduces is the hummingbird. He describes each aspect of hummingbirds and just begins to relay many facts. At one point he goes on to describe the anatomy of the bird by comparing the size of its heart to the size of a pencil eraser, “A hummingbird’s heart is the size of pencil eraser. A hummingbird’s heart is a lot of the hummingbird.” (Doyle 94). Human beings know their size because they are self-aware but when Doyle starts to describe such tiny animals he has to use it in comparison to something that people come in contact with on a daily basis. By doing this, readers can try to grasp the size in the heads as they stare at the end of their pencils but beyond that they can’t truly understand when he even admits that their hearts are even majority of their little bodies to begin with. It’s so hard to fathom something living this tiny because of the size people actually are. With this, Doyle conveys the idea of only knowing what’s on the surface of their own lives instead of others, in this case the hummingbird. It is hard to comprehend what you can’t experience on your own.

As he continues to describe these hummingbirds he goes on to talk about their speed and just how fast their lives are really going by at. “They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest.” (Doyle 95) With this statement the reader will try to understand that just by knowing how fast a car goes but since humans don’t live at that rate, it’ll never actually be understood. Hummingbirds even have such a short life span because of the speed they live at. Doyle goes on to compare living like a hummingbird and living for two years or living like a tortoise and living for 200 years. In this instance he even refers to the reader as “you” because he wants to really hit home with the reader and make it relatable to them.

Eventually Doyle begins to contrast extremely with the hummingbird he was just talking about. Then he talks about the blue whale which has the biggest heart in the world. In fact, he literally relates it to the size of a room so that the reader could stand up in the room they’re in and possibly try to understand. As he goes on, he describes them more and their “unimaginable puberty” (Doyle 95) that they endure at the age of either seven or eight. With specifically using the word “unimaginable” he tries to again touch on the fact that humans go through puberty but the blue whale’s version of that puberty is out of our grasp. 

Nearing the end of the poem Doyle focuses more on hearts in all animals. He lists of different animals and a fact about their hearts, “Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber…” (Doyle 96) with this is he trying to portray the fact all beings have something beating inside of them. All beings are similar in that sense but different because of the fact that their speeds are different, they have a different number of chambers and so on. He wants to show the reader this because of the fact that neither the animals nor the humans will ever live one another’s lives and therefore will never experience that feeling or difference just like unknowing of life after death. 

Lastly, Doyle explains beyond just the anatomy of the heart of each being. The heart isn’t just that organ beating inside the body but more figuratively the place that holds memories and emotions. He says, “So much is held in a heart in a lifetime.” (Doyle 96) although we are all of different size and the speeds of our lives are all unique to our own bodies, humans and animals still capture the same things as they go through life. A hummingbird’s life might only be two years because of the pace of their hearts but they still capture the same aspects as the tortoise that lives till they are 200 years old.  In the end, humans can only try to imagine what it’s like to have a heart that beats faster than their car can go or the size of their room.

Overall, life is fleeting and no one knows for sure what will happen to themselves. It’s good to embrace the current life you are living and try to understand and be open minded about what isn’t. As depressing as it comes out to sound, Doyle wanted to express how life comes and goes and we all die. The hummingbird and the blue whale represent the two ends of the spectrum, a very small short-lived animal to a very large long-living animal, that we can only begin to understand with his brief descriptions. We, as humans fall somewhere in the middle. Using his knowledge of these animals will help the readers to understand but only to extent that we can even understand life itself.

Work Cited

Doyle, Brian. “Joyas Volardores.” The Carolina Reader, edited by Ben Harley, Nicole Fisk,2016, pp. 94-96.