waltz and capsize:

So, after all's read and done, what do you make of the possible homosexuality theme? carpe diem?

I

It's there if you're determined to find it, but it seems a stretch. What I picked up on was the embattled spirit coming through some convulsively argumentative and contradictory loop from which it attempts to make sense of, coming into life already fated to be self-seeking and self-defeating.

This , for me, suggests an absent God whose plans have gotten static and stripped of anything like grace or transcendence, and the generationally collected consequence of ill will and meanness congests the air, as it were, of the elevated plain. It's an existentialist situation mixed in with a notion of eternal recurrence, reincarnation; Mailer does something similar with his novel Ancient Evenings in which a magic-dabbling Phaero manages to extend his lineage through the ages, but grows increasingly distraught that his version of immortality morphs in meaning and uses beyond his grandiose scheme.

Homosexuality might well be one thing Donnelly intended for his stew of tensions and bad faith results, but I don't the poem is about the problematic nature of being gay and attempting an authentic ,loving life; the narrator's dilemma, I think, is more open ended than that, and this is where the power of the poem lies for me, in the way the language can be so vivid, concrete, and yet remain oblique.