Reading “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 the audience to consider the hummingbird. As small and fragile the bird is thought of as, it holds one of the most demanding and powerful hearts of any creature. Doyle educates the reader with facts of the hummingbird’s capabilities such as visiting a thousand flowers a day with its heart beating ten times a second. “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). It’s almost as if nothing could possibly stop this adventurous bird. However, no living creature on earth can handle such a continuous rapid lifestyle without the need to slow down. What the heart needs to keep beating will also kill it, thus proving that “the price of their ambition is a life closer to death” (Doyle 95).

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).

Showing the side of excitement in life, the hummingbird lives to see the beauties in the world with its fast-paced lifestyle that never seems to slow down but lives such a short life.

Moving the poem along, the enormous heart of a blue whale is brought up. Although Doyle doesn’t provide as much facts of the big fish as the hummingbird, he does describe the blue whale’s heart as possibly being a room in a house with the heart alone weighing seven tons.

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).

With approximately ten thousand blue whales in the world, it is implied that humans know near to nothing about these creatures who roam the big blue ocean. So why does Doyle even mention them? What does the blue whale and the human heart both share? 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 onto the heart of the human. He brings up the fact 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. Many human beings have the privilege of growing up in a loving household and live through each day without having that fear in the back of their minds of one day being alone. But your parents won’t always be there in your life and you’ll come across another human one day and trust them to love you for who you are, only to end up betrayed. 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.

Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. 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, that 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 (Doyle 96).

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.  The emotions that the heart holds in a human’s heart can sometimes be overbearing and could possibly end in death of a broken heart. Showing the side of pain in life, the human being depends on another to feel happiness, but is given pain in return. “So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, in an hour, a moment” (Doyle 96).

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. Although no living thing would be able to do what it is capable of without the heart being the driving force and supporting them, the heart is also what fails them in the end.  