Thanks, John, you're a treasure-trove of knowledge. I'm beginning to wonder if there's anything you don't know?
I'm still wondering about the "sheath" bit. I just went to Google Translate to find the Latin word for sheath. I got:
vagina sua:. Then I swapped, to get the English word for
vagina sua without the colon, and got
scabbard.
I will think more about the poem.
***
I ran the Ronsard poems through the Google machine, so I could see the literal English, and hear the French. I have astounding difficulty with French. The sounds come out of my speakers, and I can barely follow along, trying to match sounds to letters. With Latin or German I don't have this kind of difficulty, though I have a little trouble with Spanish. But alas, I am deaf, dumb and blind to French, it appears.
My great loss, as I would
so love to read Baudelaire in the original, not to mention Balzac, Proust, Rimbaud, Verlaine, the list goes on...