In Joyas Volardores, Brian Doyle talks about hummingbird’s hearts, blue whale’s hearts, and how we humans put up a wall to protect ourselves from pain. He uses a lot of symbolism, sentence structure, and imagery to get the themes across. He uses the symbolism of the hummingbird and whale hearts to show us all hearts are the same, he uses sentence structure to better connect everything, and he uses imagery to give us a better understand what he is trying to symbolize

In the first few paragraphs Doyle uses imagery such as “a hummingbird’s heart is the size of a pencil eraser”, “their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal hearts’, and “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. to show us just how incredibly small and powerful a hummingbird’s heart while he uses imagery such as “It’s as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around it”, “the largest animal we have ever known”, and “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 way bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day”, to show how big a blue whales heart is. He uses these two examples because he can show that even in the smallest bird and the largest animal ever to exist that they both have hearts which do the same exact purpose. He tells us this in paragraph 5, “No living being is without interior liquid motion”

Brian Doyle also uses lots of symbolism. As already stated he uses the hummingbird and the blue whale to show that every being no matter how small or big has a heart that churns blood. For example, “Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.” . The fact he uses all of the being in the animal kingdom such as reptiles, mollusk, fish, insects, and worms to also further his point that all animals, no matter how big or small has a heart or a churning motion in their body. He even uses the smallest being of all, a single celled organism to exemplify this point. The fact he is willing to go and use such a small and insignificant being really exemplifies this point.

Brian Doyle’s sentence structure is actually amazing in this story. If you look closely you can see he stays very consistent the whole time in how he writes. He states an idea gives a question, then uses some imagery to get his point across. He does this to connect everything. By using the same sentence structure, he can connect the humming bird and the whale even further also does this in the last paragraph to connect it to the earlier paragraphs. The sentence structure also gives the essay a very scientific feel. By using lots of imagery and facts he can get his point across and present the reader and idea.

The last paragraph contains a lot of imagery and symbolism in it. Although it is vastly different than the earlier paragraphs and most of the essay as it is not scientific but symbolic, it still does relate to the earlier paragraphs quite well. It uses symbolism such as, “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” (Doyle 69-72) and, “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”, to symbolize that although we try to so hard to protect ourselves from feelings because feelings are what gets us hurt even the angriest person can be felled by a an act of kindness.

I really like Joyas Volardores because it He uses the symbolism of the hummingbird and whale hearts to show us all hearts are the same, he uses sentence structure to better connect everything, and he uses imagery to give us a better understand what he is trying to symbolize. Brian Doyle’s main themes are that all beings no matter how big or small have hearts that churn out blood and that anyone’s hearts can be felled by an act of love.
