Brian Doyle begins his essay by saying “consider the hummingbird for a long moment,” then going on to describe how the explorers in America called the little birds “Joyas Volardores” which means flying jewels. Doyle pays specific attention to the heart of the hummingbird, comparing it to the hearts of other animals later on in his essay to finally compare them all to the heart of a human. With use of dramatic and informal word choices as well as grammatically incorrect sentence structure, we can see how Doyle compares all of the hearts to express how important it is to spend the time one is given the best one can. 

The author uses overly animated word choices to emphasize the intensity of his comparisons. Doyle calls human ears “elephantine” compared to the “infinitesimal” chests of the hummingbird that holds a heart that is the “size of a pencil eraser”. Doyle does not use simple words like small and large, or fast and slow. Doyle describes the pencil eraser heart as “hammering” inside it’s chest, it is Doyle’s use of overly embellished words that focus attention to the contrasts he is trying to make, like how despite how incredibly tiny the hummingbird is, it’s heart is working so hard a human’s large ears would not be able to differentiate the individual heart beats with how fast it is pounding at all times. Doyle then goes on to describe the bird as “whirring” and “zooming” as it visits a “thousand flowers a day” at “sixty miles an hour” stunning numbers compared to the small bird, used to show how much such a small creature with such a small heart accomplishes in a day. He describes nighttime for them and how in the “frigid” cold their hearts “halt” to preserve energy, once again emphasizing the intensity of the small bird’s life, dramatizing the course of nature with such extreme words. 

Doyle compares the racing heart of the hummingbird with the short lifespan of two years to the heart of a tortoise who lives to be two hundred years old, a strong contrast to one another to emphasize the “price of their ambition” and how nearly all creatures have two billion heartbeats in their lifetimes and how “you” can spend them slowly like the tortoise or quickly like the hummingbird. The author specifically uses “you” as in to speak to the reader, drifting more from speaking about just animals and their hearts, to more about humans in general and how they spend their lives. Next the hummingbird’s heart is compared to that of the blue whale, an animal that has the biggest heart. Doyle describes a whale’s heart as being “as big as a room” a steep contrast to the heart of a hummingbird that is the size of a “pencil eraser”. “Penetrating” and “piercing” is used to describe the tone of a whale’s call, exaggerating his words to create a more intense visual of the whales.

Along with his consistently overly dramatic word usages, Doyle break the “typical” writer’s rules in regards to the formality of his words. It is his sporadic uses of informality throughout the work that contrasts to the scientific facts and seriousness of the message he is conveying. The contrasts between informal and formal highlights when the author does use informal words like “waaaaay” and “mama” as well as “unimaginable” to describe the whale and its size. The author uses “miles and miles” to describe the distance the whale travels instead of a more formal measurement like how the author describes the hummingbird’s increase in mitochondria to sustain the hummingbird’s quicker heartbeat. Doyle is trying to emphasize the importance of living life to the best of one’s ability all while breaking standard rules in written English, especially in formal essays such as this one, as if to show through his writing how he has decided to use his two billion heartbeats, by challenging the norms. 

Throughout the entirety of the essay Doyle uses run-on sentences that are typically lists, sometimes without commas. Doyle uses his lengthy lists to describe the condition of the hummingbird’s heart slowing in the cold with a list of chronological actions. He uses another lists to describe the physical appearance of the hummingbird. Doyle continues to use lists to express how little is known about the whales listing details from travel patterns to social life to “arts” of the blue whale. The lists are not only noticeable long but so detailed the lists seem less about the specific animals mentioned and more about the reader or humans and general, relating back to the author’s main message. This is particularly noticeable with Doyle’s list for the whale where he describes what is unknown and in that list is “spirituality” and “wars” words typically associated with humans. 

In the last paragraph exclusively about humans Doyle uses lists to describe memories people have throughout their lifetimes. Unlike with the animals, emotional and internal actions are being described, contrasting to the external and physically qualities and actions described for the birds and whales. For the humans Doyle lists what a person would describe as deeply emotional and all hypothetical with his use of “perhaps”. The lists range from words like “bruised” and “scarred” to “fragile” and “rickety” to instances like “a child’s apple breath” and “your mother’s papery and ancient hand in the thicket of your hair”. Doyle is describing childhood from skinned knees and young gossip to early morning pancakes but he describes such instances with words leaving much to be desired. His lists are rather negative angles of a child’s life, describing even some of the best things in a young child’s life as rather frightening and scary. 

With Doyle’s use of dramatic and informal word choices as well as sentence structure one can see the importance of using the heartbeats one has to live life to its full potential, to look back on a life filled with bruises from wild adventures, pancakes in the mornings. Doyle uses his specific word choices and lists to emphasize how small the heart of a hummingbird is, how much living it gets done in one day, because it only lives for two years, meanwhile nearly all creatures have the same amount of heartbeats given, just depends how fast they go by, and how they are used. Doyle mentions how “expensive flying” is and how one can “burn out” no longer speaking about the hummingbird, but rather humans and how everything we do has a cost and that our lives are not never ending, so like the hummingbird we have to be busy, using what we have to get the most out of our day. Then also like the blue whale, not everything is known, a lot of life is still a mystery. Doyle compares human hearts to that of all different animals to show how “we all churn inside” representing how all creatures have a purpose, have something driving them and we all have only so many heartbeats to do it. 
