Where It All Goes Down
It might come as no surprise that, in a poem titled "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket," most of the poem actually takes place—wait for it—in a Quaker graveyard in Nantucket. The sea-side location is the perfect spot for the speaker to look over the water and ponder the lives of those lost at sea, whether it was those whaling sailors of times past or Lowell's cousin who died during WWII.
When the poem opens, though, we're in the midst of a violent sea-storm, one that reveals the drowned sailor to the crew of the North Atlantic Fleet. Though we don't know the date, we can probably assume it was near WWII, since that is when Lowell's cousin (to whom he dedicated the poem) died. After this scene-at-sea, the poem finds calmer ground, and the speaker contemplates how the sailor's life compares to those who died back when the whaling industry was a big deal in Nantucket. As he stands in this "field of Quakers in their unstoned graves," the sea stays violent, and he imagines the final scene between whale and ship in Moby Dick (88).
The only time the poems moves away from the sea is in Section 6, when we find ourselves in England to visit Our Lady of Walsingham. It's a stark contrast to conditions aboard the ship, shifting us to a locale that's peaceful, quiet, and holy. We don't spend too long in this calm setting before heading back to the graveyard, and this time it's spooky, with "empty winds creaking." It's a turbulent final setting for the speaker to imagine the sea as a place where bodies are both butchered and created.