16 pages • 32 minutes read
Gary SotoSaturday at the Canal
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Wildness of Youth
In Soto’s poem, the youth of the two teenagers is linked to an innocent wildness that is encapsulated both in the liminal space of adolescence and the restlessness of the time period. The speaker states in the first line that he is 17 when the poem takes place. The age itself is significant to the conflict in the poem – he is old enough to drive, to spend time with a friend by the canal, and to think for himself—he is almost ready to leave home. But he is not yet 18, and he doesn’t have an adult’s freedom. He must still finish high school, he must live with his family, and he can only watch the water flow out of town and dream of where it leads instead of following it himself as he so longs to do. Indeed, his youth is what draws him to the excitement of places like San Francisco and ignites his desire to see the larger world, but it is also what prevents him from doing so.
The imagery of the poem continues to shape and enhance this theme. The pent-up energy of the two teenagers throwing stones is contrasted with the seeming unrelatable oldness of the teachers who were “Too close to dying to understand” (Line 5) his teenage angst. Soto presents this youthful spirit with the images of their “shoulder length, wild” (Line 15) hair blowing in the wind and in the “white-tipped” (Line 21) but dark water rushing out of town. Almost like little boys, they are depicted “hurling large rocks at the dusty ground” (Line 9). These two teenagers, who do not drink or smoke, embody a certain beauty and purity in their restless wildness, depicted with imagery that is linked to powerful forces of nature, like the wind and water. This is particularly the case once the poem shifts from the depiction of the high school where the air is stagnant and smelly. Finally, that youthful energy is immortalized when it feels like he will never be able to leave, remarking, “The years froze/as we sat on the bank” (Lines 19-20).
Bad School in a Boring Town
Soto has been open about his personal underperformance in high school, where he was neither challenged nor encouraged to excel as a student. The first half of “Saturday at the Canal” alludes to the problems with some schools in working-class neighborhoods, where the emphasis is on attendance and obtaining that “sharp check mark in the roll book” (Line 2), rather than learning, growing, and developing individual strengths. The speaker is not the only student underperforming at this school, as he references the school stinking of “poor grades and unwashed hair” (Line 6). The speaker knows his life is limited by the school and cannot even derive joy from the banal weekly ritual of the high school football games, escaping instead to the canal with his friend to dream of a better life and imagine the possibilities beyond the cramped classroom and the bleak small town.
While the desire to grow up and leave town is common among high school students who cannot wait to live life by their own rules, these opening lines establish that the mediocrity of his school and the lack of engagement for many students is particular to his community. Read alongside the other poems of Home Course on Religion, the speaker’s frustration connects directly to his struggles with the low expectations of his friends, family, and teachers, as he tries to hold on to his own larger questions and desires for his life.
Commiserating Together
One subtle theme that is woven throughout “Saturday by the Canal,” and many of Soto’s poems in this collection, is the presence of friendship and of commiserating together. The speaker is unhappy at age 17, but he is not alone. Soto could have depicted himself alone in this short poem, but the deliberate presence of the unnamed friend in Line 7 shifts the tone of the poem. The two are “feeling awful” (Line 10) together because San Francisco seems so far away. They hurl “large rocks” (Line 9) together, they both have longer hair, and ironically, they are both feeling the same loneliness (Line 17), together. They sit together on the bank, and even their eyes move together, following the water “racing out of town” (Line 21). They mirror each other in movement, in silence, in their desire to escape, and in their inaction.
Despite how isolated the speaker seems to feel and how much of an outsider he appears to be by avoiding the high school sporting and social events, he is in the presence of a friend for most of the poem. This theme of friendship and collective scars, of experiencing trauma but never quite suffering alone, is a common theme for much of Soto’s work in Home Course on Religion and throughout his present work. His grades are bad, but everyone’s grades are bad. He longs to leave for San Francisco, but he has a companion in that desperate, delayed desire. This theme of friendship subtly communicates to the reader that life is difficult, but you are never truly alone in that suffering, and many of our struggles are, in fact, universal.
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