An unidentified speaker describes an unidentified person that one can presume to be the titular tyrant. In the first line, the speaker asserts that the tyrant was after the perfection of an indescribable type.
In the second line, the speaker says that the tyrant invented a kind of poetry that was not difficult for most people to easily understand.
By the third line, the speaker's description zeroes in the tyrant's intuitive ability to understand the universal character flaws of humanity, suggesting that these failures were as instantly identifiable to him as his flesh.
The fourth line has the speaker commenting on the tyrant's unusually elevated interest in all things military.
The fifth line moves into the sphere of politics with the sly insinuation that his influence was so great that politicians instinctively knew to laugh at whatever the tyrant himself found comical.
The final line is the most ambiguous of the poem's description as the speaker insists that whenever the tyrant cried the result would be that small children died in the streets. The structure of this final line implies that the tyrant's crying is what causes the death of children rather than that the death of children causes the tyrant to cry.
