“Twisting the Rope” has a couple of interpretations. The listener could understand it as humorous or tragic.

The bones of the story is that a young man and young woman have a tryst and fall in love. The lad is smitten, and speaks of how meeting this woman made him cast aside his boyhood. Eventually he makes his way to her house, but when he enters the wily mother gets rid of him by setting him to making a hay rope for the roof thatching.

The implication is that as he twists the rope he has to back up, and he goes right out out of the cottage, at which point the mother cuts the rope and slams the door in his face.