Brian Doyle’s work, “Joyas Volardores”, was his most famous poem and was published in American Scholar 2004. If you are here, it is because of your heart. The heart is a complexed machine that allows all creatures to live. This muscle acts as a pump sending blood, the essence of life, everywhere in the body. Brian Doyle uses images of the drastic differences in the size of a humming bird’s and a whale’s hearts as a metaphor for the resilience of the human heart no matter relational experience. 

The author used the hummingbird as a symbol to represent the tenacity of the heart. Tenacity can be interpreted as the strength of the heart to continue beating in any situation. The heart is resilient because it will adapt to different conditions. The rate at which the heart beats might change in relation to different conditions, but it will always keep beating.  The author states that “The price of their ambition is a life closer to death . . . It’s expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine.” (95), he creates a metaphor between the action of flying and the tenacity of the heart. In whatever situation, the will to live and the instinct to survive are the priority. The heart will do everything to keep its body alive. Contrary to the literal sense, flying, in this particular case, means to succeed at any cost. Flying in the context of the heart implies that the heart is going to follow its passion, beating an appropriate rate to maintain the person’s life. 

 At school, my Physical Education teacher used to tell me that you can do anything if your life depends on it. If we were being chased by a lion, we would run the fastest we could have ever imagined in our entire lives. Brian Doyle stated metaphorically, “To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate” (95). This explains how important the heart is by comparing this mechanism with a car engine. Brian Doyle also used the hummingbird as a symbol of decision, “Every creature on earth has approximatively two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime” (95). In this case, the hummingbird chose to live a shorter life, but more intense life because obviously everything goes faster for it. Now, take the example of the tortoise who lives way longer, but everything about them is going slower. The speed of life is directly related to heartbeats. A two-year old human baby has experienced less heart beats than an octogenarian; a day for the baby will represent a larger fraction of his or her life. One day in the adult’s life will seem nothing regardless to his or her past experience of time. As hummingbirds and tortoises chose speed of life, at some point, humans need to make choices that will effect their lives. The hummingbird decided to live a shorter life, but that does not mean that the hummingbird did not enjoy his life and was not happy. The relationship to how one lives is based on how much time they have already lived their lives.

The author used an antithesis between the hummingbird, who is really small, and the biggest animal on the earth, the blue whale. He wanted distinct examples to prove that according to each animal the heart can be a different symbol. The blue whale’s heart is “big as a room” where kids could play (95). The immensity of the whale’s heart is directly proportional to the immensity of the universe it lives in. The heart is so gigantic that “A child could walk around it (95). In this vastness, we will always be alone in the end. The blue whale’s heart chambers are each the size of individual rooms in a massive house. Brian Doyle explained, “we live alone in the house of a heart” (95). Imagine an individual living alone in a castle. He used this quotation to reinforce his statement of loneliness. Moreover, he explained that the feeling of loneliness comes at a certain age, when we begin to be able to understand how choices effect our life. Young people have an idealized image of life and love as Doyle explains, “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” (96). A kid has the illusion of protection by their parents, but when they grow up, they realize that their parents will not live forever. At one point, there will be the individual, and only the individual. Individuals cannot fight their nature, either animals or humans. Different species live their own lives, alone, even if they make their way with someone. Even if one has a partner in their lives, who lives everyday with the person and knows everything that can be known about that person, this partner is not the other individual, and will never be connected to their physical bodily metabolism. Doyle expresses the same feeling by stating that “We are utterly open with no one at the end” (96). A mutual experience has individual interpretation. The heart is an individual’s best friend. “So much is held in a heart in a lifetime” that the heart is the only thing that truly knows a person (96). The only things that keeps a person living is their heart. That person lives alone besides their heart. Their heart has the ultimate power to make decisions for this person. 

The heart is not only a physical muscle; it is also the symbol of emotions. When we say “I love you” to someone, we say that it comes from our heart. Actually, the heart is just a pump, which irrigates blood vessels. With these feelings, our heart can be emotionally damaged with love, deception, expectation, dreams. As Brian Doyle said it, “all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall” (96). Our heart has been through a lot during our lifetime, even though we always find a way to fix the caused damages. With the hummingbird, Brian Doyle wanted to show the tenacity of the heart as a muscle, but with humans he wanted to show how strong our heart is when it is emotionally damaged. However, we cannot protect our heart from emotions. Humans have this capacity to feel when something is sad, happy, scary, and fighting against it would be a lost battle. “You can brick up your heart as stout and tight . . . your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children” (96). The author experienced it, himself, because he is giving us this advice when he said, “I have something to tell you” (96). Describing a father in the kitchen making pancakes for his children, Brian Doyle wanted us to feel emotions and then show that we cannot hold back these feelings. 

Brian Doyle showed us life under different aspects, using the imagery of a heart. He used the hummingbird to describe its tenacity, and decisions we can make in our lives. This tenacity is also true for how we feel; with pain, our heart always heals with time. Even though we want to protect the heart because suffering is not pleasant, we cannot prevent the flow of emotions. The blue whale was the symbol of loneliness. The comparison between the heart’s chambers and rooms in a house show how immense this world is, and how small and alone we are. Even the biggest animal on earth has no influence on it.
