Life & Mortality Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence grabs the Moon by the lapels and refuses to let modernity talk it down. The line is a little shout of indignation dressed up as lyric: “The Moon! Artemis!” comes in like an incantation, a name-dropping of the old world’s charge and glamour. He’s not arguing astronomy; he’s protesting a cultural demotion. To call the moon “a dead lump” is to reduce a living symbol to inert matter, the same flattening move Lawrence saw everywhere in early 20th-century life: industrial rationality, mechanized work, sex turned clinical, feeling turned into a “case.”

The intent is defensive and aggressive at once. He invokes Artemis, the virgin huntress and lunar goddess, as shorthand for a time when nature wasn’t merely scenery but a presence with agency. Lawrence’s rhetorical question is a trap: if you answer yes, you’re admitting you’ve traded awe for a fact-check. The “splendid past of men” isn’t nostalgia for better science; it’s nostalgia for a fuller sensorium, a world where myth functioned as a technology of meaning.

Contextually, this sits neatly inside Lawrence’s broader revolt against what he considered the deadening effects of modern consciousness. He’s not naive about the moon’s physical composition; he’s furious about the spiritual bargain that comes with insisting that the physical description is the only legitimate one. The subtext is a warning: once you train yourself to see the moon as mere rock, it gets easier to see bodies, desire, and even people that way too.