Read the second half of the title together with the first line and the poem turns out to be one long sentence: "I will build my cottage with the lobster traps stacked against the green fence, under the old willow..." The words "April Bonus Poem" look like a label attached from outside, so the real opening is the vow itself. The poem begins with a decision already made, and the speaker sounds less like a daydreamer than like someone who has just picked up a hammer.
The first lines back up that impression. Lobster traps, a green fence, an old willow: the details are specific, a little untidy, and far from picture-postcard. Judging by the imagery, this is a working shoreline where gear gets left lying about, and the speaker means to settle among it. The location gets the plainest language in the poem, which makes it solid ground, and the poem is about to leave it.
The next move is the odd one. The cottage "will be made of sea wrack / and sea foam." Wrack is what the tide dumps on the beach, tangled weed and debris. Foam is what the tide can't hold for more than a moment. Between them they cover the discarded and the vanishing, and neither would support a roof. The repeated "sea" and the hissing s sounds make the phrase itself sound like water draining back through shingle. Then the cottage is "painted the color of islands," a phrase that is lovely because it refuses to settle. Islands are green, grey, or blue with distance, depending on where you stand, so this colour is a view and not a paint. The building will also "flash in the light like a gull's wing / in the morning." The line break leaves "in the morning" stranded on its own, as if the sentence paused to let the light arrive. A house that behaves like a wing is not a house in any ordinary sense.
So the cottage is imaginary, and the last lines say what it is for. The syntax tilts into an old-fashioned inversion, "there will I wile my time," which sounds like a ballad or a tale told aloud. "Wile" is the surprise. The usual phrase is "while away the time," but "wile" carries the older senses of trick and charm. Whether the spelling is deliberate or not, it suits a speaker who plans to pass his hours by enchanting someone, probably himself first.
The diction shifts here too. After the vocabulary of traps, willow, foam and gull comes "the world of plans and contingencies," dry, office-like and clumsy. "Contingencies" is a long, awkward word, and it sounds like the thing it names. The speaker wants to be "lost" to that world, and "lost" works two ways, as absent and as absorbed. There is a gentle joke in the next line as well. He escapes planning by "carefully sculpting" his stories, and that adverb admits the retreat has its own discipline. Stories are the real building material, shaped the way a beachcomber might arrange wrack. The closing participles, "sculpting" and "becoming," leave the action unfinished.
The last two words carry the poem's central idea. "Becoming a legend" is part ambition and part irony. A legend exists only in being told, and to be talked about you must be out of sight. Vanishing into the cottage is how you end up in everyone else's conversation. A legend is also a story that has outlived its facts, which is exactly what a cottage of foam would be.
The poem is significant for how lightly it holds all this. It makes no argument against modern life. It sets a bright, flimsy, beautiful alternative beside "plans and contingencies" and lets the reader feel the pull. It uses free verse with no rhyme. Short lines name places and long ones roll out like waves during the building, and one unbroken sentence never stops to doubt itself. Its suggestion is that a retreat can be made of language, and that someone who wants to get away might do better to build a story than a house.