Arms and the Boy The title alludes to the opening words of Virgil's Latin epic poem the "Aeneid": "Arma virumque cano" ("Of arms and the man I sing"). The poem is written in heroic couplets, in which successive pairs of lines have related ending sounds. In this instance, the final words do not rhyme; for example, "blade" and "blood" in the quotation. This is a scheme called half rhyme. Text of the Poem at Poetry Foundation 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;
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