You certainly need to understand what a song or a poem is about. But this does not mean you always need to pin down the imagery - images are fluid, and ambiguous, and don't work like painting by numbers.

And the writer of a song or poem isn't necessarily the final authority, songs and poems can take on a meaning that might not have been in their mind at all, and that new meaning, given to it by the people who pick it up and pass it on is equally valid. Johnny I hardly knew ye is a case in point.

Fergie's comment about the lady having a job in a bakery in a bakery has the smack of truth about it, and if so it's a charming little touch for Patrick Kavanagh to have put in the reference - but that's only the beginning of the sense of the phrase, in the context.

It provides a hint of formality and majesty, maybe it suggests that it's all a game on her part, it suggests a down-to-earth practicality about her, with flour up to the elbows.

Again "I not making hay" simultaneously suggests that he knows he's wasting time on this, when he should be writing poems or whatever, and also that he is a long way from where he came from in the country, stuck in the city.

Put the two together, and he's a peasant and she's a queen, and it's a fairy story.

And so on and so forth. The images are multi-faceted.