I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
D. H. Lawrence’s poetry is characterized by terse, punchy lines like this one. Here the poem is interested in what separates man from beast, human from non-human. 
 As it turns out, self-pity is one of those things that only humans can muster. It comes with a very negative connotation, as if to say that this exclusively human trait makes us inferior. 
 The  enjambment  after “wild thing” allows the reader to conjure up an image for this vague term. 
 The reader has a brief chance to take away the ambiguity from the text and project upon it a subjective image of the wild thing. Since the act of reading slightly changes the meaning of the poem, it becomes more personal; the reader is more invested, more introspective, really putting the “self” in “self-pity.”
Self-Pity