Nothing in the opening line sounds like a weather report: "it is a disease of the wind / to keep going to sea." Wind is normally a force, something that does things to the world. Here it is a patient with a condition it can't shake, a compulsive urge to drift toward open water, where there is nothing to push against. The poem is about that urge, and about what waits at the end of it. By the last line the wind has begun to look less like a natural force and more like a living thing preparing to die.
The word "disease" matters because it makes the wind's restlessness feel involuntary and slightly sad. We usually admire wind for its freedom. Calling its wandering a sickness suggests that going to sea is a kind of fate, the way a person might be unable to stop leaving places. The verb is just as telling. "Keep going" implies repetition, a habit that happens again and again without getting anywhere.
The second stanza turns on a small piece of wordplay: "fleet as the fleet." The first "fleet" is an adjective meaning swift, the second a noun for a group of ships. The line sounds like a simile, but it quietly folds back on itself, because a fleet of sailing ships is swift only because of the wind. The wind is being compared to something it powers. This echoing, almost circular phrase suits a poem about a wind that goes out and returns and goes out again.
Then comes the pivot: "but too small for the great ice / or a ship on a still night." The "but" deflates the speed and grandeur of the line before. Set against "the great ice," an iceberg or polar ice sheet, the wind is slight, almost embarrassed. The last image is harder to pin down, and the poem is better for it. A ship on a still night is a ship without wind, so in what sense is the wind "too small" for it? One reading is that the wind is too feeble to move such a ship. Another is that on a still night the wind is simply absent, and the ship sits in the place where the wind should be. Either way, the poem gives us a world of huge, slow, silent things, and a wind that cannot fill them.
The final stanza is two lines, and the single word "dancing" stands alone before the second. The poem never says who is dancing. It could be the wind swirling over the water, the fleet rocking on the swell, or the ship on its still night. That missing subject lets the word spread across everything that came before. What follows undercuts it at once: "preparing for an ordinary death." After "disease," the word "death" feels earned, as if the poem had been tracking a slow illness. But "ordinary" is the surprise. There is nothing heroic or tragic here, only a fading, the way a breeze drops. The dance is a rehearsal, and the poem seems to say that dying well might mean being quietly, unspectacularly part of the world.
Formally, the poem is spare. It is free verse with no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, which gives it the drifting feel of its subject. The stanzas run two lines, three lines, then two, so the poem seems to thin out as it goes. The sounds help: "wind," "sea," "fleet," "ice," "still," "night" are mostly short, clean words, many with long vowels, so the lines move lightly and then settle. Even the one slightly long word, "preparing," is followed by the plain, heavy "ordinary death," which lands almost like a shrug.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so few words. In under thirty words it moves from sickness to scale to dance to death, and it never explains the connections. It asks us to notice that a small, ordinary force can be given the dignity of a life, with a compulsion, a place in a larger and colder world, and an end. The poem doesn't mourn the wind or tell us how to feel. It sets down "dancing" next to "death" and trusts the reader to hear that they belong in the same sentence.