The title promises catastrophe, yet the word "typhoon" never appears in the five lines. We get an accounting instead. "The wages of the sea, fair or foul" borrows the cadence of the old biblical line about the wages of sin, where wages are what you are owed for how you have lived. Here the sea is a paymaster that settles up whatever the weather. "Fair or foul" is an everyday phrase for good and bad conditions, but it also colours the sea with a moral tint, as if the water were passing judgment. A typhoon is foul by definition, so the phrase quietly suggests the damage is not confined to the storm itself. The sea collects either way.
The second and third lines are where the poem gets slippery. "Will be the undoing / of thousands they could not find." Who are "they"? Nobody has been introduced. One reading is that searchers could not find thousands of the missing. Another is that the thousands themselves were looking for something and never found it. The grammar does not choose, and that vagueness is the point. "Undoing" is also a more interesting word than "death" or "destruction." It suggests thread coming unpicked, something carefully made falling apart. The line break after it leaves the word hanging for a beat before we learn who is undone, and the answer is only a crowd, counted but unnamed.
Then the scale collapses. After "thousands" come two small, singular things: "a missed church, / the last reading of the night…" The poem never says how these relate to what came before. Perhaps they are the sort of ordinary moments that disaster interrupts. Perhaps they are ways of being undone: a service not attended, a final reading not heard. "Reading" is deliberately open. Beside "church" it sounds like scripture or an evening devotion, but it could just as easily be an instrument reading, a barometer or a bulletin, which would pull the line back toward the storm. Judging by the imagery, the poem wants both resonances, the sacred routine and the weather record, to sit side by side without settling.
The form supports this restraint. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only free verse with a gradual tightening. The first line is the fullest, with its alliterative "fair or foul" and its almost measured four beats. Line four shrinks to three syllables, and "missed church" jams two heavy stresses together, so the phrase stops short, as though the speaker had tripped on it. The last line recovers some length, but its ellipsis refuses to close the sentence. Quieter sound-links hold the fragment together as well. "Find" and "night" share their long vowel, so the unfound and the dark rhyme faintly, though never formally.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it handles an enormous subject by declining to show it. There is no wind, no wave and no wreckage, only an abstract ledger and then two domestic details. That choice reflects how large disasters are actually experienced. The headline figure of "thousands" is too big to feel, while a missed church or an unfinished evening ritual is small enough to imagine. The poem makes the reader do that imaginative work, moving from the number to the particular and then feeling the gap between them.
The ellipsis at the end matters too. A poem about the unfound ends on a sentence that is itself unfinished, so the form acts out the loss it describes. Because the poem is so short and withholds so much, it asks to be reread, and each pass changes who "they" are and what the last reading might be. It leaves a reader with the sense that a typhoon is measured less in the water it moves than in the ordinary things that never happen afterward.