Polly Chatfield's kindness, wisdom, and indelible smile inspired my curiosity at and beyond Commonwealth. I am grateful for her commitment and compassion as teacher and leader.

Adam Kirsch '79

Polly has been a guiding presence ever since I came to the Commonwealth in 2001. Whenever she visited school, she greeted me with a joyous warmth that would stay with me for the rest of the day. She also generously donated many Classics books to me and the school, including her Oxford Latin Dictionary, which she lovingly inscribed. She always went out of her way to encourage me in my teaching or summer projects, and I was thrilled when she agreed to be a guest lecturer in my Renaissance Art class. The depth of her knowledge always took my breath away; she has been a beacon in my own pursuit of excellence as a teacher. To me at least, Polly embodies everything that I cherish about the Commonwealth community.

Don Conolly

It is possible that Polly Chatfield was (is) secretly an angel. It might be a simple explanation for her extraordinary kindness, generosity, patience, and wisdom, from which we lesser mortals (I was her faculty colleague for a decade in the 1980s) benefited daily, year after year after year. But it’s also possible, and even simpler, to imagine that Polly, year after year after year, devoted every day to living by the only rule that really matters—not the roller skating one, but the golden one. This was her great gift to all of us. Oh, lucky, lucky us, to have known you, Polly!

Richard Robinson

Mrs. Chatfield (after all these years, I still can't quite bring myself to think of her as anything other than "Mrs. Chatfield") was an amazing teacher and someone that I always felt was "in my corner" the whole time I was at Commonwealth. She seemed like one of those people who was just born to encourage others. I have very clear memories of her teaching us how to use quotes from original sources in our writing during Renaissance History. It was something I struggled with a bit at first, but she was patient with me—while also not lowering her expectations one iota—but my clearest memory is of how incredibly excited she was for me when I started to get the hang of it. I can practically still see her comments at the end of my papers in my mind. I'm not sure I can think of anyone else I've known who took such pure joy in other people's success.

David Wiseman '79

What an angel and a blessing Polly Chatfield was. She holds a very special place in my heart. I remember reading Ovid aloud with her, and how she teared up at the beauty of his poetry and made me fall in love with Latin. Todd Senturia, Anthony Kuhn, and I studied Ancient Greek with her in a semi-private class. Polly was infinitely patient and encouraging as we learned to read Homer, Herodotus, Aristotle. Polly was a teacher, a mentor, and loving friend over the years. After Commonwealth, thanks to Polly, I spent a semester on a Greek Island, and then went on to get a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Classics. I dedicated my Ph.D. thesis to Polly, Polly's voice and heart still resonates in the work I'm doing today. A few weeks ago, as I was working on a new painting, heard the first lines of The Odyssey in my head—Ennepe Mousa—which became the title of the painting. Polly Chatfield was that Muse who inspired me from the moment I met her at Commonwealth in 1983. Love you, Polly.

Deborah Fryer '81

To me, Polly reflected the ideal of the scholar-teacher. Though she had been retired from teaching for about seven years when I started at Commonwealth, I considered Polly a mentor, especially since I was taking on her fields of Medieval and Renaissance history, as well as Latin. She bequeathed to me hundreds of slides of High Medieval architecture, as well as an "ancient" Harvard Coop notebook filled with her own translation of Beowulf. Polly always encouraged me to expand my teaching and research to cultures beyond the West and into modern history, and her constant support for my Hughes Grant proposals year after year made that possible. But most of all, it was Polly's deep confidence in the mission of Commonwealth to encourage the creativity and intellectual inquiry of our students that I found inspirational. She just seemed like the heart of the place.

Barbara Grant, Former History and Latin Teacher

Mrs. Chatfield, Polly, was my Latin 5 teacher and my advisor, and I often admired her patience and felt sorry for her as I stumbled through my translations. She was a constant at Commonwealth for decades. She helped the school grow from a dream to a thriving reality and had a hand in its growth every step of the way, during the good and not so good times. She was gentle on the outside but as strong as they come on the inside. Her mind and hands were never, ever still, sometimes knitting a sweater for a relative and sometimes a blanket for a little one in need, as she attended board meetings–and she did attend, never missing a detail or a nuanced comment. She was a mother to so many of us, quietly loving and nurturing us, sometimes in spite of ourselves. She shared all of herself with all of us and gifted her family to us as well. Mr. Merrill was the brains of Commonwealth but Mrs. Chatfield, Polly, was the heart of the place.

I will miss holding your hand during meetings, and the soft click of your needles as you make your next gift–always, always giving. Thank you for all you’ve done for Commonwealth, and for
me.

Judith Sanford-Harris '70

Polly Chatfield was my Renaissance History teacher in the fall of 1988, my first year at Commonwealth. I joined the class about a month into the school year, because I initially started the year in eleventh grade but made a decision to go back into tenth grade (for a variety of reasons). And because she and Charlie were going on sabbatical in the spring, it was a single-semester class and I had missed about twenty-five percent of the material. Nevertheless, Polly was more than willing to take these unique circumstances into account when considering my class participation and quiz/exam schedule, and even created custom tests for me! I kept thanking her, over and over again, and she basically told me, "If I didn't do this for you, I wouldn't be doing my job." Although that was the only class I had with her in my three years at Commonwealth, I remember her vividly as a calm and wise presence in the community.

Mark Feldman '91

Mrs. Chatfield was a pillar of strength, and as a parent I was honored to have known her.

Cornelia Hanna McMurtrie P'90

Any teacher is beholden to their own teachers, especially if they came back to teach where they were once taught. Of all my Commonwealth teachers, it’s hard to imagine one who could have influenced me more than Mrs. Chatfield, my teacher in tenth and twelfth grade Latin; Renaissance history; and English 12. My memories of her are indelible. The trivial things, of course, stayed with me the most vividly: the flash of the colored stones on her fingers, her tactical use of profanity—just when it would wake a teenager up to hear it in the classics, and the day I sat beside her in the front seat of her car, driving back from a museum day trip to Salem, and we were almost sideswiped on the Tobin Bridge. And I remember, too, fighting with her in class and on paper for my own interpretations, which I later realized were both wrong (Keats was not saying that it would be better for the young liver to be able to kiss his beloved on the urn) but also profound (that bad reading, paired with Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning" helped me wrestle with my adolescent fears of death). There was also her faith in me, no matter how often I got it wrong—she always held out a higher standard  for me and told me again and again I had the capability to reach it. But more than anything I am grateful for the poetry. It was Mrs. Chatfield who taught me in our study of Ovid how much paying attention to the rhetorical devices and the diction deepened one’s pleasure in the poem. It was Mrs. Chatfield in English 12 who allowed us to linger over the lines of Paradise Lost that brought me many jolts of pleasure as she let the words melt on our tongues. It was Mrs. Chatfield who introduced me to the poetry that still helps me make sense of my life today: not just "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens but also his "Ideas of Order at Key West"; Yeats' "Second Coming," of course, which comes to mind so frequently these days; and so many poems by George Herbert and Gerard Manly Hopkins, whose lines continue to ring in my ears as they are now thinking of those three years nearly forty years ago, and of that gracious, patient woman with the colored stones on her hands who taught us with affection and continued to take care of this brick building that has such people in it in all the years since. 

Melissa Glenn Haber

I knew Polly from faculty meeting and some personal interactions during the 1975–76 academic year when I taught physics and math at Commonwealth. Her gracious and delightful presence remains vivid in my memory—despite all of the intervening event-filled years. In any discussion, whether with me personally or in a group setting, Polly was always charming and supportive of what she perceived as worthy goals. But she had no patience with mediocrity of thought. When I think of the many wonderful people I have had the pleasure and good luck to encounter over the years, she still stands out as having led an exemplary life—full of purpose and joy. All of us who knew her will miss her deeply.

Victor DeGruttola

I took Polly's Latin III (Ovid's Metamorphoses, then Martial and the younger Pliny) and Renaissance History in 1978–1979, my only year at Commonwealth. She was by far my favorite teacher there, and the one I learned the most from, one of the teachers I've owed the most to in my whole academic life—she was one of the people who did most to turn me to the humanities, and certainly the person who did the most to turn me to the classics. She communicated joy and excitement in the classical and Renaissance-Reformation texts, showed how much you could get out of them by reading them closely together, but for me above all her classes were where I learned that there are rigorous disciplinary standards in the humanities and not just in math. It was, at the beginning, a brutal lesson, but one of the most important lessons I've learned, and Polly did a great deal to shape everything I've done since (philological scholarship, ancient and medieval philosophy, and theology and science). I did initially quite badly in the Renaissance course, and many years later, when I wrote the background chapter on Renaissance philosophy for the Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, I sent it to her to show her that I had eventually internalized her standards and was very relieved when she sent me a sweet reply rather than a list of corrections. Polly loved the texts and her students, and had seemingly inexhaustible energy for both, but maybe none of us knew how many other demands there had been on her. She had had six children by her first husband Michael Post (the first died in infancy), then she had taken care of him when he was dying of cancer, then raised the five children by herself. I think it was her husband's illness that stopped her from getting her Ph.D. at Harvard (she could have had an academic career like her brother Michael Putnam, the brilliant scholar of Latin poetry at Brown, who died two months before Polly), and Commonwealth and family kept her very busy, but after she retired she published three volumes of texts and facing translations of Renaissance Latin poetry (Bembo, Landino, Marrasio) in the Villa I Tatti Renaissance Library. And she kept pouring her energy into so many other things, too—into Commonwealth long after her retirement, charitable projects, her high Anglican church community, no doubt many other things of which I know nothing. No doubt her faith helped sustain her in that love and that energy, but it doesn't do that for everyone. She was a channel of grace to the world. 

Stephen Menn '80

I never took a course with Mrs. Chatfield, but I wish I had because I remember both Mr. and Mrs. Chatfield always treating me with kindness and respect and warmth. In an age when fewer and fewer people devote their lives to one mission or one institution, Mrs. Chatfield’s life of service is an inspiration to all of us, My sincere condolences to her family and to the Commonwealth community.

Steve Liss '73

I am deeply sad to learn of Polly's passing. During my tenure on the faculty at Commonwealth (1975–1982), Polly was a warm, kind, and generous mentor. She exuded lovingkindness. Whenever she spoke up at faculty meetings, hers was a voice of sense, reason, and compassion—and people listened to that voice. Polly's kindness toward me inspired me to calligraph for her the Hebrew text of Proverbs 31:10-21, an alphabetical acrostic poem that lauds a "woman of valor." Several verses from that text speak to me when I think about Polly, perhaps the most apt being the following two: "She opens her mouth with wisdom, Her tongue is guided by kindness.... Extol her for the fruit of her hands, Wherever people gather, her deeds will speak her praise." So may it be. Polly: Rest in peace...

Rabbi Carl Perkins, Former Chemistry Teacher

I reside in the U.K. I was blessed to meet Polly in the Chapel of SSJE near to her apartment. A lovely, gracious lady passionate in her beliefs. With a colleague, enjoyed the pleasure of her company for tea at her apartment nearby. God bless Polly, may she rest in peace! 

John Grice