The speaker's sympathy for the grain mouse underscores the poem's central theme of human empathy for animals. This theme is reinforced by the poem's language, which is simple and direct, and by its rhyming couplets, which give the poem a cheerful, almost nursery-rhyme-like quality. As a result, the poem invites readers to share the speaker's sympathy for the grain mouse and to reflect on the ways in which we are all connected to the natural world.