“The Weather-Cock Points South” appears in Amy Lowell’s collection Pictures of the Floating World (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921). In Queer Poetics: Five Modernist Women Writers (Greenwood Press, 1999), Mary E. Galvin, an instructor of literature, writing, and women’s studies at the State University of New York, Albany, argues that, in Lowell’s poem, the “descriptive exploration of the flower is transformed into a celebration of lesbian sexuality [. . .].” Commenting upon Lowell’s possible use of floral and lunar imagery to signify female sexuality, Galvin writes, “While these images are rich in erotic possibilities, I don’t quite believe Lowell was interested in encoding the sexual message too deeply. If anything, it seems Lowell wants to be sure that the reader gets the sexual connotations of the poem by using the already heavily connotated words ‘Thrust upon’ at the beginning of the last line. Lest the reader think this is the familiar heterosexual ‘thrust,’ however, Lowell immediately contrasts the potential violence of this verb with the sonorant phrase ‘by a softly-swinging wind.’ This final phrase carries lesbian implications not only in its reversal of expectations, but also in that it echoes back to the first stanza, where the wind is the only agent of motion besides the speaker, ‘I.’ Thus, Amy Lowell, who often read her poetry in person, by dint of authorship, associates herself with the speaker, who in turn is associated within the poem with the wind, as agent of erotic caress.”