Just to prove that nothing is intuitive,
Far from what an English-speaker would suspect,
You don’t learn something Russian, you learn “to it”—
The object is you, the subject’s indirect:
“Towards math,” “towards French,” the teacher makes you do it,
As if the student’s grabbed by the scruff of the neck
And dragged toward facts necessitating brute
Force for youthful temperaments rebellious;
But for the willing captive and the more astute,
A hint’s enough: Look, there goes Chemistry, there goes Elvis.
There goes Elvis – An allusion to the urban myth that pop singer Elvis Presley (1935 – 1977) never died, but is still seen unexpectedly.