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.
John Freeman (poet) John Freeman (poet) John Frederick Freeman (29 January 1880 – 23 September 1929) was an English poet and essayist, who gave up a successful career in insurance to write full-time. He was born in London, and started as an office boy aged 13. He was a close friend of Walter de la Mare from 1907, who lobbied hard with Edward Marsh to get Freeman into the "Georgian Poetry" series; with eventual success. De la Mare's biographer Theresa Whistler describes him as "tall, gangling, ugly, solemn, punctilious". He won the Hawthornden Prize in 1920 with "Poems 1909-1920". His "Last Hours" was