From beasts we scorn as soulless, In forest, field and den, The cry goes up to witness The soullessness of men.

In these lines Hartley turns a common human prejudice—treating animals as “soulless” and therefore morally negligible—back upon humanity. The “cry” rising from beasts in “forest, field and den” suggests suffering that functions as testimony, indicting human cruelty or indifference. The sting of the final line is the reversal: it is not animals who lack soul, but men who behave as if they do, forfeiting compassion and moral imagination. The verse participates in a long ethical tradition (often allied with animal-protection writing) that measures human civilization by how it treats the vulnerable, and finds that humans can be more brutal than the creatures they dominate.