A stout man sits down in a grove in the morning, and for the length of one sentence he turns into a bear. That is the whole event, and the poem is only four short lines long. Its central idea comes in the second couplet, when the watcher admits that he, too, is wearing a pelt. The title is plural, and the poem earns it: "Bears" names the man and the speaker both.
The first couplet sets the scene lightly. "In the morning grove" gives us a time and a place but no story, and "grove" carries a slight hush, as if the trees were a small room set apart. Then comes the claim: "a stout man would be a bear." The verb is slippery. "Would be" can mean "is the sort of thing that would be," as if the speaker were guessing, but it can also echo the old sense of wishing or intending, as in "would-be." The man may be a bear, may resemble one, or may want to be one. "Stout" helps the comparison along. It suggests bulk and solidity, but it also hints at sturdiness, so the bear here is more settled than frightening.
The image sharpens in the third line: "his care in sitting." The poem picks out one small, slow action, the way a heavy body lowers itself and arranges its weight. "Care" has two meanings here. It is the carefulness of a large creature moving gently, and it is a quiet tenderness on the speaker's part, since someone has to be paying close attention to notice such a thing. Notice, too, that the line has no real verb for the man. His care just hangs there, observed and unexplained, like the man himself.
Then the poem turns on the speaker: "as I look / with my hide of a good face." The pun on "hide" does the most work in the poem. A hide is an animal's skin, which keeps the bear comparison going, and to hide is to conceal. A "good face" is the composed, pleasant expression we put on when we are watching someone and don't want to be caught at it. The speaker's face is both skin and disguise. The look is also hard to place. Without punctuation, we can't tell whether the speaker looks *with* the good face, like a tool, or whether the good face is the thing looking. The man is bearlike in his sitting, and the speaker is bearlike in his watching, still, patient and half-hidden. They are two animals in the same grove, each studying the other.
The form supports this quiet mood. There is no punctuation and no capital letters, so the poem moves as one unbroken thought and the pauses are left to the reader. The syllable counts are loose but not careless: the first two lines run five and seven syllables, which recalls the opening of a haiku, before the next two stretch to eight and seven, as if the poem had settled into its seat. There is no end rhyme, but the sound is still tightly knit. "Bear" at the end of line two is echoed almost at once by "care" in line three, so that rhyme leaps across the gap between the couplets and ties the man's body to the speaker's attention. "Look" and "good" share their short, rounded vowel, and "hide" and "I" share a long one, which quietly links the self to its disguise. Even the sounds seem to say that the speaker and the bear are made from the same material.
The poem is small, and it is best to be honest about what that means. Its significance lies in how much it does with so little. It takes a familiar human habit, watching a stranger and keeping a neutral expression, and shows that habit as something older and more animal. Politeness becomes fur. The poem also avoids judging the man, since the comparison is gentle and even affectionate. It doesn't say who the stout man is or what the speaker thinks of him. What stays with us is the idea that when we look closely at another creature, we end up describing ourselves. Reading it aloud, with a slight pause after "bear," gives a good sense of how still the poem is.