Reading through “Joyas Voladoras” for the first time, it seems like a very factual poem and really draws you away from the focus of the actual meaning of the story. The author, Brian Doyle, uses vivid descriptions to depict how the heart is fragile yet powerful, both emotionally and physically. But why exactly does Doyle compare the heart of a hummingbird and a blue whale to the heart of a human being? Analyzing animals in relation to humans may be a way of emphasizing the interconnectedness between all organisms, showing how much excitement, love, and pain is held in a heart in a lifetime. Although the heart is the driving force behind every living creature, it is also what fails us all.

Doyle begins the poem by asking us to consider the hummingbird. As small and fragile as it is, the heart of the hummingbird is powerful and demanding. With it only being the size of a pencil eraser, it can beat up to ten times a second. Doyle explains that the hummingbird is capable of doing many things such as visiting up to a thousand flowers a day. “They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest” (Doyle 95). However, no living creature on earth can handle such a continuous rapid lifestyle without the need to slow down.

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, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow old and they cease to be (Doyle 95).

What the heart needs in order to keep beating will also kill it, thus proving that “the price of their ambition is a life closer to death” (Doyle 95). The hummingbird has immense metabolisms that basically “eats oxygen at an eye-popping rate” (Doyle 95), making heart attacks and aneurysms and heart ruptures more likely in a mere two years. “Consider a moment” (Doyle 95), Doyle continues,

Those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmet-crests and botted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant’s fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled (Doyle 95)

Telling you to once again consider the life of the hummingbird and how such a fragile, exciting lifestyle ends in such a short amount of time. Doyle then relates the end of the hummingbird’s life to human creations: “You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the machine” (Doyle 95). It seems as those who are fully in life are more close to death.

Moving on, Doyle then speaks about the enormous heart of a blue whale. With it weighing more than seven tons, the blue whale’s heart could possibly be a room in a house. Doyle then talks about the lifestyle the blue whale grows into and how huge it grows in such a short amount of time in its life.

It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day, and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken (Doyle 95). 

Doyle relates the whale to the human again when he implies that

…for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs and arts of the blue whale (Doyle 95).

Humans simply have not yet discovered. As ginormous as its heart is, it has ample capacity to love, but Doyle suggests that whales never seem to be happy loving another. Although it is said that “the animals with the largest heats in the world generally travel in pairs” (Doyle 96), many just commend that love is an integral part of a whale’s life. On the other hand, “their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles” (Doyle 96) say otherwise. The blue whale may truly love their partner whale, but their hearts force them to live in constant misery, killing them slowly.

Finally, Doyle moves the topic onto the heart of a human. He explains that “we are utterly open with no one in end… We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart” (Doyle 96). Humans come into this world and allow people to look after their heart, but still end up alone because of our fear of vulnerability. Doyle suggests that the human builds up this wall around their heart to protect it from getting “bruised and scarred” (Doyle 96) because we treasure the heart at that level. But even if one built such a wall a hundred times, it will crumble down eventually due to human emotion, making the human more vulnerable than ever before.

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, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children (Doyle 96).

Doyle ends the poem with childhood-like memories that bring back emotion since the heart forces and allows the human to feel. The heart’s reaction will always destroy those protective walls and leave us defenseless.

In conclusion, every living thing is affected by the heart and Doyle connects them through an overshadowing paradox of the heart. When Doyle establishes a felt connection between living things, he describes the communal experiences by mentioning the line “we all churn inside” (Doyle 96). He references a sort of turbulence of the heart that every living organism experiences throughout life and what gives all living creatures life also destroys it.

Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them 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).

Because of this shared organ, all creatures must endure the same process, defending its heart through experiences that threaten to ravage it. Despite the great differences between a hummingbird, a whale, and a human being, Doyle was able to showcase that the heart is able to tie all kinds of life together.