Calm is usually described as an absence, but here it becomes a death in the household. The wind, which we normally treat as weather, turns into a "he": someone who has drowned, been buried, and left a gap in the speaker's nights. The central idea is that loss changes not only what we feel but what we are asked to do. Without the wind, the speaker is left facing a duty, "the service of the sea", and has lost the companion who might have made it bearable.
The opening image is a small impossibility. Wind is air, and drowning is what happens to creatures that need air. "The wind drowned" sets the elements against each other, so that the force that stirs the sea is swallowed by it. The poem never says where the drowning happened, but the sea waiting in the last line makes it the obvious guess. Then comes "and went to his grave", delivered flatly, almost like a line from a folk tale. There are no adjectives of mourning and no exclamation marks. The grief arrives in the plainness.
Memory follows, and it is surprisingly domestic. The wind is not remembered as a roar or a storm but as conversation: "his infinite talk at night." Calling the talk "infinite" is what a mourner does, since it felt endless while it lasted and is now finished. Then there is "his cup of good air." A cup is something offered across a table, so the wind becomes a host, and air becomes a drink poured for the speaker. It is also, quietly, breath. Wind, breath and spirit are closely linked ideas in many languages, and the poem seems to lean on that link without announcing it. What the speaker has lost may be a companion, a source of breath, or both.
The sound and shape of the poem back this up. It has eight lines, no rhyme and no regular metre, but it has a clear contour. It opens on a three-syllable line, "The wind drowned", and closes on another, "of the sea?", so the poem begins and ends on short, dropped notes. The longest line, "I miss his infinite talk at night", sits third, where the feeling is most direct. The vocabulary changes too. The first half is almost all one-syllable words: wind, drowned, grave, miss, talk, cup, air. After the turn at "And where am I," the diction stiffens into "person", "honor", "undertake", "service". The speaker moves from intimate speech to an almost official register, as if grief had put on a uniform.
That final sentence is the poem's most interesting piece of construction. It runs across four lines with only commas to slow it, so the question seems to drift outward like open water. The line break after "service" leaves the word alone for a moment, and it can sound like a funeral service or a church service before "of the sea" redirects it. It could also mean naval duty, or the work of a servant. Its meaning stays open. Having been poured a cup by the wind, the speaker is now expected to do the serving. After the word "grave", it is also hard not to hear "undertaker" inside "undertake", though that echo is a reading of the sound, not something the poem states.
"A person of honor" is the wry centre of the ending. The phrase is grand and slightly comic. It suggests someone who cannot simply walk away from an obligation, even though the one who made the obligation workable is gone. Pride and helplessness sit in the same phrase. The speaker is still bound by duty but no longer has the means to carry it out.
The poem is significant because it does so much in so little space. It treats a natural fact, a windless sea, as a bereavement, and it makes the sea, which is usually vast and impersonal, feel like a household to which the speaker owes something. It also refuses consolation. The poem ends on a question, with no memory to console and no acceptance reached. The last line leaves the speaker, and the reader, with the water.