The semester began with noble vows,
Fresh notebooks breathing academic hope,
Pens aligned like soldiers before Waterloo,
And students marching into classrooms
Armed with coffee, ambition, and photocopies
Stapled at impossible angles.
Then entered the syllabus.
Not a document—
No, no—
A continent.
A monstrous empire of names and dates
Stretching from Beowulf to Postmodernism
Like some cursed pilgrimage
Designed by sleepless scholars
Who believed time itself
Was merely a colonial construct.
The professor smiled gently.
“We shall finish everything.”
A silence followed.
Even the ceiling fan laughed.
First came Old English—
A language apparently invented
By gargoyles choking on consonants.
“Hwæt,” declared the teacher,
As if summoning ancient spirits.
Students stared at the page
Like archaeologists discovering a dead civilization
Buried beneath unnecessary grammar.
Then marched in Chaucer,
Dragging twenty pilgrims behind him,
Each speaking in spellings
That looked like keyboards falling downstairs.
One student asked, trembling,
“Will this come in the exam?”
The professor answered,
“Everything is important.”
Thus began the first funeral of confidence.
Then Shakespeare arrived—
Not alone, of course.
Never alone.
He came carrying thirty-seven plays,
Several sonnets,
Three tragic heroes,
A ghost,
A fool,
Two mistaken identities,
And enough literary criticism
To collapse entire libraries.
Students read Hamlet in fragments,
Like citizens gathering remains after war.
“To be or not to be”
Became less philosophy
And more attendance policy.
Meanwhile, Macbeth murdered sleep,
King Lear murdered sanity,
And Othello murdered trust
In group projects forever.
Still the syllabus stretched onward.
Milton entered next, blind but unstoppable,
Dragging Paradise Lost behind him
Like a theological train accident.
One student attempted Book I.
Another attempted Book II.
A third attempted Google summaries
And was seen praying in the corridor.
The professor said solemnly,
“You must appreciate the epic similes.”
The class collectively lost the will to live.
Then came the Romantics,
All emotionally unstable and walking near lakes.
Wordsworth wrote about daffodils
As if flowers paid rent.
Coleridge saw albatrosses everywhere.
Keats coughed beautifully into eternity.
Shelley became the patron saint
Of unfinished assignments and dramatic weather.
Students highlighted entire poems
Without understanding a single line.
By this point, notebooks resembled
Battlefields of underlining.
Then Victorian Literature arrived,
Wearing morality like excessive furniture.
Dickens introduced fourteen hundred characters
Before Chapter Three.
Hardy killed hope professionally.
The Brontës filled the moors
With emotionally catastrophic people
Who desperately needed therapy
And proper lighting.
Meanwhile, students googled:
“Difference between realism and naturalism easy explanation please urgent.”
But the syllabus was hungry.
Modernism descended suddenly—
Fragmented, exhausted, drinking tea ironically.
T.S. Eliot arrived carrying footnotes
Longer than some national constitutions.
“The Waste Land” became appropriately titled
As students wandered through it
Searching for meaning, structure, and hydration.
Virginia Woolf entered consciousness itself,
James Joyce abolished punctuation,
And Kafka transformed anxiety
Into required reading.
One brave student declared,
“I think I understand symbolism.”
He was never seen again.
Then theory arrived.
Not quietly—
Theory never arrives quietly.
Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Feminism, Marxism,
Psychoanalysis, New Historicism, Postcolonialism—
Entire armies of intellectual terminology
Descending upon innocent undergraduates
Who still struggled with semicolons.
“Discourse,” whispered one theorist.
“Hegemony,” hissed another.
Students nodded mechanically
While their souls exited through emergency doors.
At midnight they memorized definitions
Like medieval monks copying sacred doom.
Meanwhile, professors said things such as:
“You must interrogate the text.”
The text, unfortunately, refused interrogation.
Then came Indian Writing in English,
American Literature,
World Literature,
African Literature,
Ecocriticism,
Diaspora Studies,
Literature of Trauma,
Trauma from Studying Literature—
The boundaries dissolved entirely.
Every week introduced twelve new authors
And nineteen movements.
There were novels thick enough
To stop bullets.
Poems requiring historical maps.
Essays citing philosophers
Who themselves required separate reading lists.
And always, somewhere in the distance,
Another PDF waited silently
To destroy a peaceful evening.
The students developed strange survival methods.
Some survived purely on summaries.
Some worshipped YouTube lecturers
With blurry microphones.
Some annotated passionately
Without ever finishing the chapter.
Others formed study groups
Whose primary achievement
Was collectively panicking.
The library became sacred ground.
Photocopy shops evolved into economic superpowers.
Printers screamed continuously through winter.
Sleep became a mythological concept
Discussed only in legends.
Still the syllabus expanded.
Like capitalism.
Like the universe.
Like footnotes in academic essays.
One student calculated the total pages assigned
And briefly achieved existential enlightenment.
Another asked,
“Why must we study twenty critics
To understand one poem?”
No answer came.
Only another assignment.
The exam timetable arrived eventually
Like an execution notice decorated in university fonts.
Students revised chronologies
As though preparing for diplomatic negotiations with history itself.
Spenser blurred into Spencer.
Dryden into Donne.
Austen into Eliot into Eliot again.
Everything became symbols.
Everything became irony.
Even life itself developed themes and motifs.
In examination halls
Entire generations of students
Recycled the same desperate phrases:
“The poet here tries to convey…”
“This reflects the human condition…”
“In conclusion, literature mirrors society…”
Pens moved feverishly.
Knowledge evaporated magnificently.
Three hours later
The syllabus remained undefeated.
And somewhere,
In a distant faculty room,
Another professor was preparing
Next semester’s “updated course structure.”
New texts would be added.
None removed.
Because English Literature, dear student,
Is not a subject.
It is an immortal beast.
A magnificent, terrifying hydra
Whose heads are named
Poetry, Drama, Fiction, Criticism, Theory, History, Context,
And “Important for Exams.”
Cut one down,
Three more emerge carrying bibliographies.
Yet every year
Students return again—
Half curious, half doomed—
To wander through this endless cathedral
Of metaphors and deadlines.
They arrive believing
They will finish the syllabus.
By the end,
They merely hope
To survive it.
And perhaps that,
The department whispers lovingly,
Is the true literary experience.

@omernaila910