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 Bancroft (poet) Thomas Bancroft (poet) Thomas Bancroft (c. 1596 – 1658) was a minor seventeenth-century English poet, He wrote a number of poems and epigrams addressed to notable people into which he embedded clever puns. Thomas Bancroft was a native of Swarkestone, a Derbyshire village on the River Trent: he has an epigram in celebration of his father and mother buried in Swarkestone Church. He matriculated at St Catharine's College, Cambridge in 1613, where he was a contemporary of James Shirley, to whom he addresses an epigram. He was an usher (a junior grammar school master who taught the rudiments of Latin