There has not been a piece of literature that has shown such deep meaning and emotion to me as Joyas Volardores by Brian Doyle. The essay is one that moves, explains, and uncovers the two polar opposite emotions we feel - pain and love. Yet, combining the two together in ying-yang type fashion. Brian Doyle does this by combining some unique elements to the essay. Such as contrasting only to compare them back together and slowing down the time only to speed it back up.

In this essay, a reoccurring tool Doyle would use was juristically separating two things, only to simply compare them as the same. When talking about hummingbirds, Doyle would explain the hummingbirds heart as something that we could only hear when “we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests” (Doyle 94). As well as the heart was “the size of a pencil eraser” (Doyle 94). The human heart is much bigger than that and it beats at a completely different pace than the hummingbird. Later, Doyle says a child could walk through the 4 chambers of a blue whale’s heart. This is very extreme imagery and personifications. But then throughout the passage, Doyle will bring them all back together again. Doyle says, “every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime” (Doyle 95).  As well as, “no living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside” (Doyle 96). Doyle has done this to show the massive differences between whales, hummingbirds, and humans. But he had separate them to show the ultimate similarity of everyone having a heart, no matter how small, large, or intelligent they may be. This is important to the story because it all comes down to the emotions felt in your heart, whether we feel pain or we feel love, we all feel these emotions and have to deal with them. It may not necessarily be saying that whales and hummingbirds feel these emotions like we do, but every different human feels these and feels them in their own way. 

Another great element present in Brian Doyle’s writing is the use of time. At the very beginning, the first line says, “Consider the hummingbird for a long moment” (Doyle 94). At first I didn’t acknowledge this as I read the passage. However, after I finished the story, I realized the importance of this. If you sped through the passage, you would not be able to appreciate the deeper meaning. The essay is about pain and love and how everyone takes this differently. Time is an overlaying theme of the story. How one distributes time in their life, determines how long their life is. Doyle says, “the price of their ambition is a life closer to death… you can spend them (heartbeats) slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old” (Doyle 95). This is saying that you could tax your body right away by getting the thrill of your life by living life the risky way, or you could live a lot longer if you conserve your high-risk behavior. It is up to you and you could take it whichever way you want to. But, one thing that Doyle says in the final paragraph, “You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and it all comes down in an instant” (Doyle 96). This gives the reader an a-ha moment about the comment about living longer like a tortoise or living shorter like a hummingbird. No matter how old you live, you can protect yourself as much as you want, but you’re going to experience just as much pain as the next person, no matter how much you protect yourself. It is very unique how Brian Doyle uses time in reference of heartbeats. Usually, we think of time as in days, hours, minutes, and seconds. Rarely, we think of time as heartbeats and that is something very powerful that stands out in the essay. The heartbeats we exhaust determine how long we ‘live’ and how the pain affects us throughout our lives. This part of the essay was very similar to what happens in the Pixar animated film Inside Out. In the film, every single event that happens to you and causes one of the 5 emotions (joy, sadness, anger, disgust, and fear), it stores that emotion as a colored orb in a lifetime bank, and the more of those emotions you have in your bank, the more happy, sad, or paranoid you may be in your life. The film is a microcosm of one person and their emotions they feel from significant events in their life, but Joyas Volardores reveals how everyone experiences these extreme emotions, no matter how hard you try to protect yourself from it. 

In conclusion, Brian Doyle used multiple, beautiful elements that had highlighted his theme of the story, not just about hummingbirds and blue whales. But about pain and love and suffering and life. The uniqueness of taking polar opposites and bringing them so close through on common ground and a completely different view on the value of time influence Joyas Volardores in a way that makes you feel it deep in your heart. 