MaryAnn:

Perhaps another problem might be the limitations he placed on himself by using the sestina form

That is the major problem, I think, since he's obliged by the sestina's requirements to repeat phrase and idea in conspicuous variations that extinguish the possibility of surprise. Good poets work through their metaphors and themes so that a premise they begin evolves into something larger later in the work--a reader, when the poems are succesful, gets an idea of how ideas are not fixed things, unchanging, but rather change when made to interact with a crucial "otherness" that conincide's a verse's codified vernacular. There can be, I think, some playfulness in the language that can make even the most baleful subject stick with you without cramming your face deep into the moralizing. Hecht's choice of sestina, though, coincides with intent. He obviousl didn't want his audience to miss his intended ironies and picked a form that would make interesting obfuscation difficult, if not impossible.