And the owlet whoops to the wolf below,
That eats the she-wolf’s young.

These lines evoke a nocturnal scene of predation and bleak natural violence: an owlet’s cry sounds above as a wolf devours the she-wolf’s cubs. Coleridge often uses such Gothic-natural imagery to create an atmosphere of dread and moral disquiet, where the “music” of the night is inseparable from cruelty and loss. The detail that the prey are the she-wolf’s young intensifies the horror by invoking violated nurture and inverted familial bonds. Read symbolically, the passage can suggest a world in which innocence is consumed and even the smallest witness (the owlet) can only “whoop,” unable to intervene—an image of helpless observation amid brutality.