For the most part, Kennelly's "Improvement Era" work is considered naive and conventional in structure and plot. The poems are almost uniformly about romantic love. The stories typically end happily, but are varied in theme. "How Lovely Youth" focuses exclusively on young love; it concerns a young man returning from his two-year Church missionary work. "Some Beautiful Way" is about motherhood and step-motherhood, and the convergence of the internal realities of a little girl and her stepmother. "And Afterward Came Spring" is about death and a crisis of faith; given Kennelly's sub-themes in "The Peaceable Kingdom", it's notable that in this story nature, rather than doctrine, brings about "proof" and resolution.