We spend much of the poem in an actual Quaker graveyard, in Nantucket, where the unmarked graves of sailors overlooks the water. It's the setting of the speaker's contemplation of these losses and the loss of his cousin, who drowned as a military sailor in WWII. While the poem frequently moves through allusions to Moby Dick and even to a holy site in England, the bulk of the poem is still set in the graveyard, and the Quakers buried there represent the many lost at sea through their own folly and through the inability of man to overpower the all-powerful, violent waves.