I wonder how Bert felt...

I listened to the audio versons of these poems on the online textbook. In The Chimney Sweeper from the Songs of Innocence it was a young narrator describing a tough life of chimney sweeping with his friend Tom. After Tom's dream about heaven they don't see their life as that bad and believe they'll get rewarded one day, "So if all do their duty they need not fear harm." In The Chimney Sweeper from the Songs of Experience it was a tired old man. By the poem it seems because of his hard life he has lost faith in God.
These poems where definitely written to influence readers for the hopes of a social and political change. I agree with the editors of the textbook in which they proclaim that Romantic poets hoped to bring out social and political change. Blake absolutely has the power to enact social change by appealing to the imagination of the reader. It certainly had an influence on me and I'm positive it did on the readers of Blake's time. The editors of the book might have included the Parliament transcript as a primary source document to show the impact of Peter Smart's testimony. If a testimony of one man to a court can have an impact on a group of people, a poet with a much larger audience (much of them Christian), with a religous "mix" into the poem can also have an impact, but larger. Especially when the audience can indentify with the poems seeing that it has religious mix into it because after all as it says in the backround, "Most members of the upper class believed that they deserved their comfortable stations in life, and that the poor must be innately evil, deserving the hunger and appalling conditions that they endured." Blake wanted to feel sympathy for the narrators of the chimney sweeper with the hopes of change.