“Saturday at the Canal” is a poem that voices the constrained frustration of being a teenager in a small town, on the brink of the future where one does not quite belong but cannot yet leave. The poem is written as a remembrance of youth when the speaker was just 17, and moves from the superficial annoyances of school to the deeper longings of a young man who yearns to set out on his own and in experience more of life. Written in a first person conversational voice, like all the other poems published in Home Course on Religion (1991), “Saturday at the Canal” has an autobiographical feel and explores the juxtaposition of adventurous, energetic youth with the limitations and existential questions of youth itself.

The first part of the poem opens with a disappointment: the speaker “was hoping to be happy by seventeen” (Line 1), which implies not only that he is not yet happy, but he has not been for a while—and has been planning for some elusive future happiness for even longer. The following lines give the reader some insight into the source of that unhappiness. With school depicted as “a sharp check mark in the roll book” (Line 2), Soto evokes the way that high school can feel unstimulating and restrictive; it is a daily obligation in which it is less important to learn than to simply be there for the roll call.