Poetry is known to be a creative thought or an impassioned feeling using language and is expressed in many places in the world. A poem can have many different meanings according to how an individual interprets it and their own decisions. Many people go through the worst conditions and will almost always get the decision to change their life around as soon as they get the chance. There has always been the rich and the poor for many years and the poor are the ones that typically struggle. Usually, those who are born into a poor family have the decision to do good in school and get a job that pays well. In the poem “Saturday at the Canal” by Gary Soto and the song “Nothing Better” by The Postal Service the message they are both trying to present to the reader is sometimes in life tough times occur and it usually results in the individual to do something about it. Some literary devices that show the theme of coming up from tough times are figurative language, imagery, and the mood of the poems/songs. Figurative language is one literary device that supports the theme of coming back from the worst of times and the individual choices. In “Saturday at the Canal” the speaker is in school and is going through a tough life and “the teachers were too close to dying to understand” (Soto 5-6). This hyperbole is showing how miserable in life the speaker is in that current point using exaggeration and how the speaker wants to change it by heading to San Francisco. The teachers probably