"Alas, good friend" is a very polite way to start a fight, and that is the trick of Shelley's poem. The speaker addresses a hostile reviewer, as the title tells us, and responds with sorrowful courtesy instead of anger. His argument is that hatred needs two people to work. "There is no sport in hate where all the rage / Is on one side," he says, and the reviewer, who came hunting, finds nothing to chase.
The word "sport" casts criticism as a blood game, and the speaker refuses to be the quarry. He calls himself a "hateless thing," a coinage that makes him sound less like an opponent than a creature without the equipment for conflict. The reviewer's frowns fall "upon an unresisting smile," and the poem is careful about what that smile withholds. It has no "contempt" in it, nothing the reviewer could hook onto, not even "some faint sympathy of hate." The speaker denies his attacker even the dignity of being despised back.
Then comes an odd piece of advice: "Oh, conquer what you cannot satiate!" To satiate is to feed something until it is full. The reviewer's hatred can never be fed because its target will not react, so the only option left is self-mastery. The speaker sounds like a kindly tutor, though what he is actually doing is telling the reviewer to calm down.
The poem's strangest image follows. The language of hatred becomes the language of courtship. The reviewer has a "passion," and the speaker is "coy," colder than "ever yet was coldest maid or boy / In winter noon." A cold winter noon is a pointed picture, with the sun at its highest and giving no warmth. Hatred is turned into a hopeless crush, and the critic into a suitor being politely turned away. Calling it "passion" is a small insult, because it suggests the reviewer's feeling is more obsessive than principled.
The form helps the tone. The lines are iambic pentameter in rhymed couplets, a measured, almost conversational rhythm. Shelley lets sentences spill over the line breaks ("all the rage / Is on one side"; "an unresisting smile, / In which not even contempt lurks"), so the speech sounds unhurried, like someone thinking aloud and not someone shouting. The rhymes click shut with a soft snap: *see/me*, *rage/assuage*, *smile/beguile*. The poem has thirteen lines, though, not fourteen or twelve, and the last three rhyme together: *antipathy / free / me*. That extra line works like a sting in the tail. The word "me" also ends line 2 and line 13, so the poem begins and ends with the speaker standing in the same calm place, unmoved by everything said in between.
The final sentence is the cleverest. In the myth, Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection, and the nymph Echo, who loves him, wastes away until only her voice is left. Shelley borrows this: "If I am the Narcissus, you are free / To pine into a sound with hating me." The speaker cheerfully accepts the role of the self-absorbed one, and the reviewer becomes Echo. Judging by the image, the reviewer will shrink into noise, a voice that only repeats and has no body behind it. Whether Shelley meant a dig at reviewers who echo each other is an inference, but the word "sound" invites it. The grammar adds to the effect, because "you are free" is offered like a permission slip, one last courtesy that doubles as the final insult.
What makes the poem worth reading is the gap between what it says and what it does. It claims not to fight, yet it is a precise counterattack. Shelley, best known as one of the great English Romantic poets, is often thought of as a visionary writer, so it is refreshing to see him here as a wit. The poem shows that composure can be a weapon, and that the sharpest reply to an attack may be a smile so unbothered it leaves the attacker with nothing to hold.