
Hearts come in all shapes and sizes and everyone has the decision on how they want to put theirs to use during their life. In “Joyas Volardores” by Brian Doyle there are several underlying messages and paradoxes that are conveyed using imagery and metaphors. Throughout the essay, he discusses different ways that living things use their hearts and how it effects the way they live. Each animal that Doyle discusses uses their hearts in various ways, but also states that it is all living beings driving force, the reason we live and the reason we want to. For all living things our hearts are our motivation to live, but is ultimately what fails all living things in one way or another. Throughout his essay, Doyle uses various living beings such as hummingbirds and their fast-paced hearts, blue whales and their large hearts, and even human beings and their hearts to further support the heart’s paradox: that hearts are what keep all living things alive and motivate us but will eventually fail us for whatever reason it motivated us.

Doyle begins his paper discussing a humming bird’s heart. A hummingbird’s heart is one of the smallest, yet fastest beating hearts of all living things, they nearly die if they stop moving and they live their life a hundred miles per hour. I believe Doyle is using hummingbirds as a metaphor for how even though their hearts are the fastest beating, and need to be in order to stay alive it is also killing them. “They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt,” (Doyle 95). This is an example of imagery and how there is no time for them to rest. Their hearts may allow them to function at extreme speeds but when it needs a recharge it can almost kill them. Doyle emphasizes this idea when he talks about the price hummingbirds pay for the amount of pressure and strain they put on their heart every day, “The price of their ambition is life closer to death;” (Doyle 95). Doyle backs up this claim by referring to their hearts as machines built for performance, but ultimately still “burns out”. Their hearts allow them to move at incredible speeds but in return shortens their lives.

The second animal that Doyle discusses is a blue whale. Blue whales have the largest hearts of any living being. They are the largest creatures on earth and their heart is the size of a bedroom. Doyle uses imagery to create a metaphor for a more aloof yet loving type of heart when discussing these giants. “There are probably ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest animal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs,” (Doyle 95-96). He seems to create a correlation between the larger a heart the more capacity to feel love. These whales devote their entire lives to another and spend every moment traveling with their partner. However, with these larger hearts and more capacity to love comes more capacity to feel pain and this is brought to attention when Doyle continues the previous statement with, “and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles” (Doyle 96). This is another paradox when it comes to hearts. The blue whale’s massive heart gives them ample amounts of compassion but can also take on plenty of pain and suffering.

In the final part of Doyle’s essay, he steps away from the metaphors of different animals and the way they use their hearts and instead, writes about human hearts to create a direct connection to us and how this paradox of the heart not just being our drive but also our downfall effects us. “We open windows to each other but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of constantly harrowed heart.” (Doyle 96). Doyle is coming to the realization that throughout our lives as human beings we are constantly searching for connections and companionship, but ultimately never fully rely on another for fear of heartbreak. He continues with stating that, “You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant,” (Doyle 96). Doyle suggests that we spend our lives building a wall around our hearts, attempting to save us from the one thing that can make our heart fail us. Although with all this effort and training, that wall can come down in an instant with some of the simplest of things such as “a women’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road…” (Doyle 96). This is the paradox of the human heart, that with all the strengthening, years of growing and building up our hearts, can instantaneously fall in a moment.

This is the paradox of the heart. Each and every living being experiences it with their own heart in different ways, but all supports the same idea, that paradox is that even though each heart gives us our motivation and drives us through our life with meaning and purpose, it ultimately will be the down fall  in our lives and will fail us the same way it inspired us. Doyle makes this claim throughout “Joyas Volardores” with various uses of imagery and metaphors, through both human and non-human living beings. Such as the hummingbird’s fast paced heart that stops them from moving too slow, but eventually burns out, the blue whale and its massive heart that is the biggest in the world and has so much room for compassion but also means it has plenty of room for pain and suffering and finally, the human heart that longs for a partnership, but builds walls to prevent heartbreak yet ultimately those walls can come crashing down in an instant. All this evidence supports Brian Doyle’s claim that the heart is a paradox that cannot be avoided no matter if you’re human or non-human, a hummingbird, a whale, or even a human.
