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) set to music by Ivor Gurney. 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