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Henry Walker Noyes (ND-ND) http://tinyurl.com/HNoyes

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The Garden of Death

From "The Pacific Monthly: A Magazine of Education and Progress," 1911. Read Online

Reader: Kevin Hearle

Maximum security, death row, the gallows. These may come to mind when thinking of San Quentin State Prison. But what about the men who die there?

Inmate Henry Walker Noyes served multiple terms at San Quentin—he couldn't help but pass a bad check when drunk. Yet sober, he was a poet of powerful expression; just listen to this segment of his 1911 poem "The Garden of Death":

Safe bound by locking waters
Within the Golden Gate
A fortress stands, remote and gray,
A prison of the state.
The flanking walls that round it sweep
A massive portal scars,
Where warders grim their vigils keep
With locks and bolts and bars.
In old San Quentin's garden
The morn is sweet with blooms;
A little square in God's pure air
Amid a thousand tombs;
And in a fountain's mirrored depths,
As you are passing by,
Bare, mocking walls on either hand
Seem reaching to the sky—
And through that glimpse of paradise
A youth was led—to die.

Henry Walker Noyes' "The Garden of Death" first appeared in "The Pacific Monthly: A West Coast Lifestyle Magazine." He also published "The Drops of Blood," a poetry collection recounting San Quentin prison life.

–Contributed by Alicia K. Gonzales.