Arms and the Boy Arms and the Boy "Arms and the Boy" is a poem by Wilfred Owen. Like Owen's other famous poems, it deals with the atrocities of World War I; in it, he portrays the loss of innocence of a child in the midst of war. Thousands like the boy are drawn into the battlefield, to the tormenting visitations of war. <poem>"Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood"</poem> It seems a wonder that a boy familiar with sticks and stones holds bayonets in the same hands and learns the coldness of death.
The Barefoot Boy the boy is referred to as a prince. The poet explains that the man has money while the boy has the world of learning. The poem celebrates a humble, plain person, much as Whittier's contemporary Henry Wadsworth Longfellow does in his earlier poem "The Village Blacksmith". Cornelius Conway Felton, a Greek professor at Harvard College, was personally moved by the poem. As he wrote in a letter to Whittier dated June 26, 1856, "The sensations and memories it called up were delicious as a shower in summer afternoon; and I forgot the intervening years, forgot Latin and Greek — forgot