I’m truly sorry man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union.

These lines come from Robert Burns’s poem “To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough” (1785). Burns wrote it after accidentally destroying a mouse’s nest while ploughing a field—an incident that prompted him to reflect on the vulnerability of small creatures to human activity. The poem is voiced as an apology to the mouse and expands into a broader meditation on how human “dominion” disrupts the natural order and the lives of other beings. It is often read as an early, humane critique of the costs of agriculture and progress, rooted in Burns’s own experience as a working farmer in rural Scotland.

Burns laments that human power over the environment has ruptured a harmonious “social union” within nature—an imagined community in which creatures coexist without one species arbitrarily upending another’s security. The phrase “man’s dominion” evokes both practical control (ploughing, enclosure, cultivation) and a moral claim of superiority; Burns questions that claim by foregrounding the mouse’s suffering as real and undeserved. The couplet also sets up one of the poem’s central themes: the shared precariousness of life. By acknowledging the mouse as a fellow participant in nature’s “society,” Burns extends sympathy beyond humans and suggests that domination carries ethical responsibility.