Twas the Night Before Classes

Twas the night before classes, and all throughout campus

The students were stirring, raising a ruckus;
The textbooks were dropped on desks without care,
In hopes that the first day of school would not soon be there;

The students weren't nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of equations tormented their heads;
And ChemEs in the dorms, and I in my hat,
Had resigned our brains to wrestle with Schrodinger’s cat,

When out on the hill there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew in a flash,
And heard from below a thump and a crash.
The moon on the grass of the slope down below,
Set the hill and the trees and the campus aglow,
When what to my half-asleep eyes did appear,
But some drunk college students clutching bottles of beer.
Leaving my window with some things left unsaid,
I turned back to my room and tried to go back to bed.
But more rapid than thirty-second notes the equations they came,
And they stayed in my brain and I knew them by name:
Now Henderson, now Hasselbalch, now Navier and Stokes,
Now Bernoulli, and Maxwell, Reynolds and Helmholzt.
Explaining fluid flow, and acid concentrations,
There were laws and rules, formulas and relations.
And round my brain, the equations they flew
With their letters and symbols, and differentials too-
And then, in a twinkling, I heard in my head
Another voice saying, “Go back to bed.”
As I closed my eyes, and was falling asleep,
Slowly away the equations did creep.
But I heard them exclaim, ere they slipped out of sight,
“Happy semester to all, and to all a good night.”