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 Idiot Boy characters portrayed in the poems beyond the simple stereotypes that the narrators provide as characterization. The impotence of the poet-narrator in the presentation of the poem prevents him from harnessing the creative power that Wordsworth identified as a "spontaneous overflow" of joy within a man of genius: the poet. In "The Idiot Boy," both the mother Betty and her son, Johnny, whom prejudice and ignorance have labelled an idiot, achieve the spontaneous overflow that characterizes a successful creation, but the poet cannot, and repeatedly laments his inability to describe in poetic form what the story contains. This poem, like many