Protecting Our Heart In the short poetic essay, “Joyas Voladoras” by Brian Doyle, Doyle describes the hummingbird and their habits. Hummingbirds, also called joyas voladoras by the first white American travelers, are tiny creatures with amazing abilities. Their hearts are what drives them to do these things that may seem impossible to humans. The blue whales are the biggest animals and also have the biggest heart on heart. Although we knew almost nothing about them, their cries can often be heard from a long distance away. Doyle then tells us about the heart chambers and how we all have liquid that churn inside of us. Lastly, he relates it back to humans, talking about the emotions that feelings that humans possess. In the poetic essay, the author suggests that people should take care of their powerful, yet fragile hearts. …show more content…
As hummingbirds have strong hearts that lets them “visits a thousand flowers a day...dive at sixty miles an hour… fly backwards… fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest” (pg.
30, line 15-19), but their hearts are often fragile too. Hummingbirds need food about two times their body weight, equivalent to a human eating a refrigerator full of food. The calories makes them powerful, despite their size. But at the same time, it makes hummingbirds vulnerable. When they are almost dying, they go into torpor. Torpor is a state of deep sleep that can cause a hummingbird’s metabolic rate almost to the condition of death. However, a hummingbird in torpor consumes up to 50 times less energy and keeps a generally cool body temperature. If they do not find something to help them survive, they might not live through the night. Their fragile hearts will cease to
be. Blue whales have gigantic hearts, in fact, they have the biggest heart in the world. A child could walk in them as freely as walking in a room, and the whale “drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gain two hundred pounds a day” (pg. 32, line 71) to reach this size. Blue whales also grow by insane rates during their puberty age, and then suddenly disappears from human sights. Nothing is known of them then. However, scientists understand that they generally travel in pairs, and although their heart may seem to invincible, “their piercing moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongues, can be heard underwater for miles and miles” (pg. 32, line 85). Humans may seem strong and sturdy, but we usually never open up our emotions to anyone, even the people who we think we can tell everything to. It might be because “we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart” (pg. 33, line 103-104). So then, we try to brick up our heart, afraid that someone might walk in and destroy everything we thought we knew. If our hearts are bruised and scarred again and again, we will continue to patch it up and pretend that everything is fine. But when they see something significant, something that may be the most memorable or the most joyful moment that you would experience, all your defense falls and vanishes into thin air. Human’s heart is so easy to break down, and a lot harder to put back. Even the most sturdy heart can fall apart, no matter how much energy it carries within. Without taking care of it, it would be even more vulnerable. In order to protect your heart, you need to comprehend both it’s power and it’s delicacy.
Dia de los reyes magos is on Jan. 5 - Feb. 2 and the day is about the 3 wisemen, But January the 6th is the special day in Mexico….. this day represents the height of the Christmas season. This celebration is where it is stated that the kings, Melchor, Gaspar, and Balthasar, traveled by night all the way from the farthest confines of the Earth to bring gifts to Jesus, whom they recognized as the Son of God. As well as regal, the Three Kings are depicted as wise men, whose very wisdom is proved by their acknowledgement of Christ's divine status. Arrived from three different directions, the kings followed the light provided by the star of Bethlehem, which reportedly lingered over the manger where the Virgin Mary gave birth for many days. In
Viva La Causa is a documentary about how hundreds of farmworkers fought for their human rights because they were treated poorly. This took place in the early 1960’s because the workers were not receiving their benefits and civil rights. A farmer himself, Cesar Chavez, spoke on behalf of the rest of the farmers saying why should they put up with the low wages and no benefits. After watching this documentary it helps me understand the functions of the legislative and executive branches of the Texas State Government by providing interesting concepts of how the government was back then and how they took action.
In the essay, “Joyas Voladuras” from The American Scholar, Doyle states that “Joyas Voladoras” translates to “flying jewels” in English. Doyle uses “Joyas Voladoras” in this essay to tell what the first American explorers called the hummingbird because they are such small, majestic birds which these explorers had never seen. (Para. 1)
La Operacion is a documentary film that talks about the massive sterilization campaign that occur in Puerto Rico and left one-third of the Puerto Ricans woman population sterilize. The documentary is complete in a sense that it shows maps, data, people speaking of their personal experience, but the most important aspect of it that it shows footage of the surgery. The repetition of the surgery scene gives an idea that this surgery was a common practice of everyday life in Puerto Rico.
One of the primary unifying forces of the Cuban community in South Florida is La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, or Our Lady of Charity. In 1898, after Cuba won its independence from Spain, she became the official patroness of the island. The Cuban soldiers credited their victory to the Virgin's intervention in their crusade for independence. The Virgin is seen as a religious tradition that strongly unites Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits. In South Florida, Cubans throughout the United States gather each year to celebrate the feast of Our Lady of Charity on September the eighth. Alongside the traditional Catholic service, many within the exile congregation offer their hopes and prayers, to the Virgin, for a Cuba free from communism.
In Mario Suarez’s essay “El Hoyo” it is mainly about a small section of the city of Tucson. It is the area that has been inhabited by Chicanos. The term chicano is the short way of saying Mexicano. Suarez explains the good and the bad about El Hoyo. He says that he does not understand why people come back to El Hoyo, but there is something unexplainable about it that it does. It is possibly the human kindness of El Hoyo that brings people back.
What is Doyle’s message in Joyas Voladoras? Well, there could be many interpretations, but I specifically think that he’s trying to tell us about the heart. It does talk about many different subjects, like hummingbirds and blue whales, but it always comes back to ONE subject: the heart, the physical one and the emotional one.
The third chapter is quite a different spin from what I read in the previous chapters from author's Gloria. E. Anzaldua's book entitled Light In The Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro. Chapter three is quite interesting. In this particular chapter on page 48, she reveals her identity as a jotitita (queer Chicana). Anzaldua goes to further states that this "mexicatjena-to enter a museum and look at indigenous objects that were once used by my ancestors"(48 Anzaldua). What is interesting to me is the she ponders on whether or not she finds her historical Indian identity at the museum. In addition, she also questions whether her identity could be found along the ancient artifacts and their as she puts it their mestizaje. I really
“Papi pulled me to my feet by my ear. If you throw up— I won 't, I cried, tears in my eyes, more out of reflex than pain” (307). As this scenario presents violence, it displays innocent Yunior’s response towards his abusive father as he pulls Yunior’s ears. In the short story Fiesta 1980, Junot Diaz depicts the life of young Yunior as he struggles with his Dominican family issues. Yunior was picked on the most in the family, especially from his dad. As Poor Yunior was the victim of his dad’s affair with a Puerto Rican woman, it affected him psychologically. Yunior suffers from the fact his beloved mother is being cheated on; therefore, he vomits as he rides his dad’s van, as his first ride in the van is linked to his first meeting with
Brian Doyle’s “Joyas Volardores” explores the life and emotions that come with being alive. This essay, even though it is written about hummingbirds, speaks about the hearts of many. To convey such emotion, Doyle intertwines long, detailed sentences with short and to the point ones all while telling a captivating story. In The Well Crafted Sentence, Nora Bacon describes a “both/and” (10) style of writing that can be used. This manner of writing showcases metaphor filled sentences that are seen as more pleasurable because they are paired with plain style sentences. By beginning his essay with compact, then leading into lengthy and descriptive sentences, Doyle accomplishes a both/and style of writing.
Much like Carson in these manners, Doyle uses metaphors to enhance the meaning of his writing in Joyas Voladoras. Joyas Voladoras tells about how all animals have a certain amount of heartbeats that they live for, and once those end, their life is over. Doyle uses the extended metaphor of the heart throughout the story and eventually brought the story back to his personal issues. Without the reader knowing that Doyle’s son was born with a three chambered heart, they wouldn’t understand the meaning as much. Once again in this case, the narrator of the story is crucial to understanding how much “So much is held in a heart in a lifetime” (Doyle 148) means to
“Poems differ as much as the people who write and read them, or as much as music and movies do” (Mays 846). Poems are the most difficult form of writing to analyze because they can be interpreted differently. Poems are composed of figurative language. Many times poems can be overanalyzed or not analyzed enough which could lead one to obtain an idea out of the poem that the writer never intended to provide.
Chua, John. "An overview of 'The Tell-Tale Heart,'." Gale Online Encyclopedia. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 7 Dec. 2010.
This pessimistic view of life reflects the helpless human condition as well as the limitations of human life. In line with the feeble and vulnerable portrait of human beings, nature is described as dangerous and uncontrollable on the one hand; beautiful on the other. The tone of the waves is "thunderous and mighty" and the gulls are looked upon as "uncanny and sinister."
Although this poem is reverent to the yellow bird, it is undoubtedly about its death and burial; it is a poem about beauty that has been “extinguished”. The “electric, excited, murmurous”(36-38) bird whose beauty pertained to its “defiance”(54) was entrapped, restricted, forced to go against its natural ways. Even when Neruda mentions the beauty of the bird, he does not forget to attach the reminder that it no longer exists or that it was taken away from the bird. The characteristics, the “yellow flashes, the black lightning”(lines 10-11), that once made the bird one with nature were covered in dirt when it was buried. Readers can imagine not only the bird encaged and dead, but also the way Neruda associated its color and way of being to one of nature 's occurrences. So when the reader imagines the bird buried, they also see yellow and black lightning. And the inevitable noise and the feeling of fearful amazement that comes with it. The burial of a bird is also a reminder of the mood at people’s funerals. Moreover, many people keep birds as pets trapped in a small cage rather than let it be free where it 's supposed to be. Many times, the captors are aware of the cruelty but still wish to selfishly and without benefits hold on to their beauty and not let it go. Intertwined in