At first look, Joyas Voladores, does not look like a poem. Instead it looks like a short essay. The poem is broken up into six parts, each one focusing on a different view of the heart. First impression is that it is very scientific. Doyle presents facts about the hummingbird in a short lesson. There is a brief background saying how there are many different species and they only exist in the western hemisphere. The scientific feel of the poem continues until almost the last part. Then he shifts into a more heartfelt tone as the speaker describes hummingbirds as “flying jewels”.  In the last part, the speaker delves into a more figurative and romantic tone while describing how closed our hearts are. The distinct sections guide the poem from confusion into clarity. At first the reader is confused as to the point in learning about hummingbirds, but it all makes sense when Doyle ties it into human emotion. The poem utilizes many literary devices such as imagery and juxtaposition to help guide the poem to a conclusion.

There are many different images conjured in the reader’s mind throughout the poem. The easiest picture would be of the hummingbird. Using words like “flying jewel”, the vibrant colors of hummingbirds’ spring immediately to the mind, the amethyst woodstars, crimson topazes, and glittering-bellied emeralds. Then he asks the reader to imagine them not waking up the next day. This sad thought conjures up the image of a dark life by forcing us to imagine a colorless world. Without all the jewel, colored birds flying about the world would be worse off than before. Likewise, describing them as “whirring and zooming and nectaring” shows the speed and energy that hummingbirds so easily possess. This part of the poem gives the feeling of the vibrancy of the hummingbird and how special a species they are, it makes us care about the hummingbird like a preservationist would make us care. One way Doyle provokes imagery is by using metaphor. He takes objects that we understand, like a pencil eraser, and compares them to something we don’t understand, the hummingbird’s heart. 

In the next part of the poem, still focused on the hummingbird, the feeling turns to a dark and bleak underbelly to the hummingbirds’ existence. The speaker switches to the topic of death. When the hummingbird is not flittering about its heart rate, “sludging nearly to a halt”, drops so low that it will almost certainly die if it does not warm itself up. I think that the “sludging” connects most closely with the idea that “we all churn inside”. This churning can be talking about our blood churning inside us to keep us alive, or to our inner turmoil when it comes to difficult decisions.

The focus shifts back to the insane hearts of the hummingbird. The speaker describes the “race-car” hearts used to drive their metabolisms. This part of the poem has a quicker pace and feels more frantic. The staccato sentences are sharper than before and instead of flowing together they beat as quickly as the heart of the hummingbird. The speaker talks about all the heart attacks and aneurysms hummingbirds are more likely to face. “The price of their ambition is a life closer to death”, this sentence makes the hummingbirds purpose feel more like a daredevil’s need for an adrenaline rush rather than just the way the hummingbirds survive. “It’s expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine” describes the hummingbirds as mechanical, not anatomical. I’m not quite sure why he does this, but I would venture that it’s to make the hummingbird easier for the reader to understand, to make a complex problem easy to understand.  

The speaker then juxtaposes a hummingbird and a whale. There is a switch from one of the smallest hearts, “the size of an infant’s fingernail”, to the largest heart, “as big as a room”. The poem also switches back to the more scientific feel, describing the life cycle of a whale and how much it eats and how much it grows in its lifetime. Doyle also states how there is still so much we do not know about whales, and personifies them by mentioning things like war, spirituality, and arts of whales.  This provokes the reader to think about other creatures as complex same as humans. Doyle’s statement about how whales, with the largest hearts, have the capacity to feel immense sadness. This suggests the idea of feeling with our hearts instead of with our minds.  

There is a final shift in the poem in the last part. This part focuses more on the human like aspects of hearts, the figurative part. Imagining that we are truly alone in the world is scary. The speaker pulls on this fear by saying that it is necessary to be alone. “We are utterly open with no one in the end” is a terrifying thought. The speaker explains that we could not stand to be so bare in front of each other. Then he goes on to say that when we were young we had a trusting sense that is laughable as we get older. By the time we are adults, we have gone through heartbreak and sadness that causes us to brick up our hearts against the world. There is hope, however, for the wall to be torn down. 

The overall feel of Joyas Voladores is inspirational. Combining the scientific and the romantic feel of the poem and it seems almost like a TED talk, where experts come together to discuss some new research, but connect it to a more human emotion. What starts out as a scientific explanation on hummingbirds turns into a meaningful lesson on human hearts. The images conjured through the intense language used leave lasting impressions on the beauty of life. 