Pope gives Dorset one fact and thirteen lines of character, and he makes us wait for the fact. The first couplet piles up titles, "the grace of courts, the Muses' pride," "Patron of arts, and judge of nature", and the verb arrives only on the last word of line 2: "died." It is a small trick of syntax, but it sets the poem's priorities. Dying is the least interesting thing about Dorset. What matters is the kind of man he was, and the rest of the epitaph is spent on that.
The portrait rests on opposites held in balance. Dorset is a satirist who was gentle, a courtier who stayed free, a nobleman whose family keeps producing worthy people. The heroic couplet suits this. Each pair of rhymed iambic pentameter lines closes its thought neatly, so the poem moves in tidy, weighed statements, and many lines split into two matched halves. "Yet soft his nature, though severe his lay" gives the severity to the "lay" (his verse) and the softness to the man. The next line pushes further: "His anger moral, and his wisdom gay." We expect an angry man to be grim and a wise one solemn, and Pope swaps the pairings. The anger has principle behind it rather than temper, and the wisdom is cheerful.
Word choice does quiet work too. "Pride" appears in line 1 as an honour, the Muses' pride, and in line 3 as a vice, the thing Dorset scourges. A scourge is a whip, and that violent image makes the claim of a "soft" nature a line later more surprising. The targets are carefully matched: "fops in learning" and "knaves in state," the vain and the dishonest, in books and in government. The phrase "though sanctified or great" can be read as covering both the sanctimonious and the high-ranking, so the satire spares nobody on grounds of status.
The moral centre comes in lines 7 and 8. Dorset "touch'd the mean so true", and "mean" can suggest the middle way between extremes, while "touch'd" suggests the precision of a musician or painter. What he achieved was satire that "show'd vice had his hate and pity too." Severity without cruelty is the ideal the whole poem praises.
At this point the poem becomes a kind of litany. "Bless'd satirist," "Blest courtier," "Blest peer" open lines 7, 9 and 11, and the repetition gives the epitaph the sound of a ritual blessing. The courtier couplet turns on a surprising adjective: Dorset could please "king and country," yet keep "sacred" his friendships and his ease. Friendship is treated as something holy, ranked above ambition, and "ease" hints at an independence the court rarely allows.
The last couplet widens from one man to a family. "Reflecting, and reflected in his race" mirrors itself, with the active participle turning into the passive. Dorset reflects his forefathers, and his descendants reflect him. The plural "other Buckhursts, other Dorsets" turns names into a type, and "patriots still, or poets, deck the line" ends on continuity rather than loss. "Deck" also suggests garlands, which links to the Latin epigraph from Virgil. It speaks of heaping up gifts and performing a "vain" or "empty" duty, an admission that praise cannot bring the dead back. Pope's poem is such a gift, but its final word looks forward, not to the grave.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in fourteen lines. There is no weeping and no "alas." The feeling shows in the choice of "soft," "pity" and "sacred," and in the care taken to balance one virtue against another. It is a good example of what Pope's couplets could do, since nearly every pair of lines holds a small argument in equilibrium. It also shows a particular idea of excellence, in which a person is admirable because severity and kindness, public duty and private loyalty, wit and morality are kept in proportion.