Nature

So there you are, just chilling, reading Sons and Lovers at an easy pace, loving all of Lawrence's straightforward sentences. Then: boom. The language explodes into epic floweriness as you're confronted with some insane, paragraph-long description of a flower.

When it comes time for Paul to find a job, he laments the fact that he has to lose his childhood innocence, which is characterized by his connection with nature:

Already he was a prisoner of industrialism. Large sunflowers stared over the old red wall of the garden opposite […] Already his heart went down. He was being taken into bondage. His freedom in the beloved home valley was going now. (5.71)

For Paul, nature = freedom and happiness. Even though he has to spend his days working in a factory, he continues to to find comfort in the natural world during his off hours. In all of his books, D.H. Lawrence tends to use nature as a source of relief from the cold forces of modernization and technology.

Later in the book, Clara Dawes expresses a view similar to that of Lawrence's. Standing on a hill, she looks over a town and tells Paul she's glad that the town isn't any bigger. Paul, however, defends the town, saying that "'it's only temporary. This is the crude, clumsy make-shift we've practiced on, till we find out what the idea is. The town will come all right'" (10.311).

In other words, Paul says the town is okay because it, like all human-made things, will eventually be gone. Here, Lawrence gestures toward the notion that even though modern technology and industry seems to ruin nature, it's ultimately nature that'll have the last laugh.