I rather think that by 1996 Sydney Carter might have been unable to deal with this, because of advancing Altzheimers. If he was able to respond to the question, it would be interesting to see how he explained his preference for retaining the words he had settled on. He was always changing the words of his songs when he thought a change was appropriate. (And he was happy when other people did the same - he saw the "folk process", and the way that songs changed as they moved through the world and through time as extremely important.)

I doubt very much if there are many people who have ever understood the song in that kind of way. It would be interesting to see if Lionel Blue had any comment on that notion in his introduction to Sydney Carter's collected songs and poems - in a BBC talk once Rabbi Blue said that that, every morning when he awakes, he sings Sydney Carter's song "Keep Me Travelling Along With You"