William Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper" - Poetry and Social Change

1) Do you agree with the editors of your textbook that Blake's poetry had the power to enact social change by appealing to the imagination of the reader?

I do agree with the editors of my textbook that Blake's poetry had the power to enact social change by appealing to the imagination of the reader. I say this because in both his poems he gets into the mind of a child who was put under these hard working labors and really makes you imagine what a child under those conditions might be thinking. Blake gives you two different versions of how a child might feel I believe in order to appeal to a greater audience and to get more of a reaction to his poems. First he speaks as a child with a more optimistic view saying that as long as he is a good boy and works hard he will be rewarded in heaven. This poem might enact social change because it makes you have hope for the boy and makes you want to try and make things better for children all over who are just working hard to be as good as they can. The second poem on the other hand is a more pessimistic view of how a child might feel under these hard working conditions. It talks about how the child feels disowned  because his parents sold him to be a chimney sweep. On the other hand this child feels as though god is punishing him and he blames the heavens. This poem might enact social change because it makes you feel bad for the hopeless boy in the poem and makes you just want to fix all the unfairness that these children have to face.

2) Why might the editors have included the Parliament transcript as a primary source document? How did it affect your reading of Blake's work?

They editors might have included the Parliament transcript as a primary source document in order for the reader to have a background on how the real conditions of child labor were and how dead on Blake was in getting the pain the children suffered through with his poetry. This affected my reading of Blake's work because once i had the background on how horrible the child labor was it made Blake's poetry sound all the more real and you almost believe it came from a child himself because those poems are exactly how you would imagine a child would feel under these hard conditions that they had to over come. It really helped me to get the deeper meaning and pain of the poem and it helped the poem affect me way more than it did before i had that background information.