Few poems begin with a wish as familiar as this one: if only nothing stood in our way. Kay Sage's "R.S.V.P." opens with a speaker imagining the removal of every obstacle, "no one to ask and no one to see," and then, instead of enjoying the fantasy, turns it into a question put to someone else: "what would you want of me?" The title is the first clue to what is going on. R.S.V.P. is the abbreviation for "please reply," the line at the foot of an invitation. The poem is exactly that: a small, slightly nervous invitation, and a demand that the other person answer it honestly.
What makes the poem interesting is that the speaker doesn't wait for the reply. In the second stanza she takes over both parts: "I'll answer for you and you answer for me." This is a bold, faintly comic move, since the speaker claims to know the other person's heart better than they do. And her prediction is disillusioned. Freedom, she says, would not produce the grand, bold behaviour we imagine: "you wouldn't do what you think you would." The argument that follows is compressed into a single, almost proverbial line: "when everything's easy, one is good." The remark has a double edge. It can mean that when nothing is forbidden, people turn out to be well-behaved, or simply that without resistance, desire loses its force. The next line decides in favour of the second reading: "you wouldn't want to, once you could."
That last phrase is the poem's central idea, and it is a sharp piece of psychology. Wanting seems to depend on obstacles. Take away the prohibition, the watching eyes, the people who must be asked, and the appetite goes with them. The poem is therefore less a love lyric than a test of how much of desire is manufactured by constraint. Whether the speaker is hurt by this conclusion or merely observing it is left open, and that ambiguity is where the poem's unease lives.
The construction is deliberately simple, and the simplicity does real work. The rhyme scheme is tight and repetitive: "free," "see," and "me" chime in the first stanza, and "free" and "me" return in the second, bound together with "would," "good," and "could." Because the same few sounds keep recurring, the poem feels like a conversation going round in a circle, which suits its subject: two people trapped in speculation rather than action. The rhythm is light and bouncy, close to a nursery rhyme or a skipping chant, and the plain monosyllables ("free," "me," "see," "good") reinforce that tone. The playfulness is a kind of disguise. A poem that sounds like a game turns out to be asking something quite serious.
Notice, too, how the repetition of "free" works. In the first stanza it is a hypothetical condition; in the second it is turned around ("if you were free and I were free"), as though the speaker were rehearsing the scenario from both sides and getting the same result each time. The shape of the poem also matters. The first stanza is a tidy quatrain, the second stretches to five lines and loosens, and the final line stands alone: "Now you answer for me." The reversal is neat. Having just told the other person what they would feel, the speaker hands over the same power, and the poem ends before any answer arrives.
That silence is the real final move. By refusing to supply a reply, the poem makes the reader the one who is invited, and a good invitation can't be answered on someone's behalf. It is a short poem, but it manages to turn a flirtation into a small philosophical trap: if freedom would dissolve the wanting, then perhaps what we call desire was never as free as we thought.