The speaker is a bear, and the poem is built around the gap between a bear's life and a human one. The first line is simple and physical: all summer spent eating, storing up fat for the cold months. That's survival, and the speaker seems content with it.
Then comes a strange, almost taunting request: "Tell me a king will come and soldiers / drink in the streets." The speaker imagines the stuff of human stories, royal arrivals, celebrations, drunken soldiers, and seems to invite it, perhaps with a little irony. The ending refuses all of it: "I stay a bear."
The tone is dry, calm and stubborn. Politics and spectacle can happen elsewhere; the speaker is occupied with appetite, seasons and the body. There's something quietly funny in the bluntness, but also something steady and self-possessed. The poem suggests that some lives run on older rhythms than the ones history keeps track of, and that staying true to them is a choice.