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.
Thomas Jordan (poet) Thomas Jordan (poet) Thomas Jordan (c. 1612–1685) was an English poet, playwright and actor, born possibly in London or Eynsham in Oxfordshire about 1612 or 1614. Jordan was a boy actor in the King's Revels Company, which played at the Salisbury Court and Fortune theatres, and continued with the company as an adult. He is known to have performed the part of Lepida, the mother of Messalina, in Thomas Rawlins's "Messalina" (published in 1640) some time between 1634 and 1636. In 1637, Jordan published his earliest known work, "Poeticall Varieties, or Variety of Fancies", which shows his theatrical background. It