Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
Here’s the poem’s tone shift. Every other line is (at least on the surface) a compliment of the tyrant. Here is the very harsh reality of who he really is and what he’s capable of. 
 
 Like line 4, the final line seems to depict the tyrant as a child himself, throwing the mother of all temper tantrums. 
 The final line is also an allusion to J.H. Motley’s  The Rise of the Dutch Republic  (1855), inverting its final line about William the Silent: “and when he died the little children cried in the streets.”
Epitaph on a Tyrant