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.
J. C. Hall (poet) J. C. Hall (poet) John Clive Hall (12 September 1920 – 14 October 2011) was an English poet and editor. Hall's poetry was first published when he was aged seventeen in the anthology, "The Best Poems of 1938". He subsequently wrote and published a trickle of short poems over seven further decades. Not a modernist, he was included in Dannie Abse's 'reactionary anthology' "Mavericks". His work was admired by Philip Larkin who described it as, "just the sort of thing I should like to have done myself" and by W. H. Auden who wrote "in the poems of J. C.