Cite This Page To Go Arms and the Boy Arms and the Boy by
Wilfred Owen  Stanza 1 Summary   Lines 1-2  Let the boy try
along this bayonet-blade How cold steel is, and keen with hunger
of blood;    • The poem opens with the speaker telling who-
knows-who to let the "boy try along" the blade of a bayonet (a
rifle with a knife attached to the end of it).    • Try what? It
turns out the speaker wants the boy to feel how cold the steel
of the blade is, and realize how hungry it is for blood.   • The
word "try" means something like "try out" or "test the
advantages of." The speaker seems to be saying "let the boy try
his bayonet out" so he can understand just how bloodthirsty the
thing is.    • Wait. We get that bayonets are for killing, but
can a blade actually be bloodthirsty? Not literally. But the
speaker's using figurative language here to make the bayonet
seem like it has will power—that its need to kill goes beyond
the boy's use of it as a weapon.   • The boy is probably a
soldier, so why does he need to learn