A storm has come and gone, and the morning after, the shore looks strange. That is the whole occasion of "Bars May Tire," but the poem's real subject is what the sea leaves behind, and the odd, half-playful, half-uneasy way a watcher reads those leftovers. Its central idea sits in the final lines: sandbars, the poem suggests, are like children who grow bored with their toys, and the strange shapes now lying on the beach are things the sea once took and has finally dropped.
The first stanza sets the scene in plain, almost old-fashioned terms. The tide "rose up the shore" and "washed about old logs long dried," a phrase that rolls along on its soft, repeated sounds. The logs are not new wreckage but old, dry timber, so the water is disturbing things that had settled into a kind of stillness. Then come "fresh weeds," carried in by the sea wind, which also "bore / Loud threats of doom." That last phrase is the first sign that the poem is not purely descriptive. Doom is a large, theatrical word for a night of weather, and the curlew's cry, which closes the stanza, feels like a tolling bell. The bird does not sing; it "cried," a verb that hovers between a call and a lament.
The second stanza turns from night to "daybreak," and the mood changes with it. Mist is the poem's great transformer: it makes the beach unreliable to the eye. In it, "mists inspire / Live fancies round each sudden form." The word "inspire" is worth pausing over, since it literally means to breathe into, and here the mist breathes life into lumps of driftwood or heaped weed, so that they seem to move or watch. "Sudden" matters too. These shapes were not there before the storm; they have appeared overnight, and the speaker's imagination rushes to fill them with life.
Then comes the poem's neat, surprising turn. The speaker does not scoff at these fancies. Instead: "For well I know that bars may tire / Of toys they took that last, great storm!" The reasoning is a little odd, which is part of its charm. The speaker is saying that the odd shapes are not tricks of the mist alone; the sea's sandbars really did seize objects in the storm and have now let them go. Calling the lost debris "toys" makes the sea childlike and careless, even a little cruel, since a toy is something you grab, carry about, and abandon without a thought for where it ends up. The exclamation mark gives the line a burst of confident, slightly wry energy, as if the speaker is delighted to have solved the puzzle.
The poem's form supports this shifting tone. Each stanza is a quatrain rhymed ABAB, so "shore" answers "bore," and "dried" answers "cried" in the first, while "inspire" pairs with "tire" and "form" with "storm" in the second. The tidy, alternating rhyme gives the poem a steady, wave-like back-and-forth, and the rhymes in the final stanza land especially well: "tire" and "storm" are the two words that carry the central image. The rhythm is a fairly regular iambic beat, which keeps the telling calm even when the subject is "doom." That contrast is quietly effective. The language promises threat, but the metre stays composed, much like a person on the shore the morning after, safe and a little amused.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space. In eight lines it moves from night to dawn, from fear to playfulness, and from observation to a small act of imagination. It also reminds us that the way we see a landscape is partly a matter of mood and light: the same pile of debris is a threat at night and a discarded toy in the morning. The poem trusts the reader to enjoy that shift without spelling it out.