Folger Shakespeare Library

Teaching Colleagues:

You do the most important work on the planet all year long, and we appreciate you all year long. We’re kind of bah-humbuggy about Teacher Appreciation Week. How about Teacher Appreciation Infinity . . . that makes more sense to us.

You teach and inspire the next generations of thinkers to delve deep, to love language and use it wisely, to ask the big questions, to wrap themselves in stories, to wonder, and to dare. And you yourselves are modeling for them all of that, every day.

So we’re sending you lots of love this week in the form of a sonnet. (And we have plenty of those hanging around here!) Sonnet 105 has three “themes,” all evocative of you and your work.

Sonnet 105

Let not my love be called idolatry,

Nor my belovèd as an idol show,

Since all alike my songs and praises be

To one, of one, still such, and ever so.

Kind is my love today, tomorrow kind,

Still constant in a wondrous excellence;

Therefore my verse, to constancy confined,

One thing expressing, leaves out difference.

“Fair, kind, and true” is all my argument,

“Fair, kind, and true,” varying to other words;

And in this change is my invention spent,

Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords.

“Fair,” “kind,” and “true” have often lived alone,

Which three till now never kept seat in one.

William Shakespeare

Love and thanks and cheers,

PO’B

Peggy O'Brien, Ph.D.
Director of Education
Folger Shakespeare Library
202.675.0372