Five short lines hold a whole day, and the way the poem is built tells you as much as what it says. Count the words: nine in the first line, then eight, seven, five and four. The poem runs down like a spring unwinding. It begins with the whole world delivering mail and ends with one person and a single verb, "I sat."
The opening line is the strangest and the most generous. "Letters came by ox and dove" sets the slowest, heaviest animal beside the lightest, fastest one. The ox plods along the ground and the dove crosses the sky, so the line seems to cover every possible speed and route. Nobody mentions a postman, a stamp or a date, and the effect is timeless, almost like a fable. Judging by the imagery, Bonta wants us to feel that correspondence is an old, patient human habit that never needed machinery. Then comes the surprise of the simile: letters are "good as oysters." It is an odd, appetising comparison. Oysters are a treat, something briny and slippery that you open carefully and swallow with relish, and the word hints at hidden treasure inside a rough shell. Calling letters good in this way makes reading them a physical pleasure rather than a duty.
Line two answers the gift. "After dinner I wrote a great many letters." The word "letters" returns, and it also rhymes closely with the "oysters" that ended the line before, so the sound ties receiving to replying. This is the only echo of rhyme in the poem, and it sits exactly where the speaker moves from taking in to giving back. The title, "Correspondent," works in a similar way. It names someone who writes letters, but it also suggests things that correspond, that match and answer each other. The speaker's evening is a reply to the morning's post.
After that the poem turns into a list, and the repeated "After that" drives it. The phrase appears three times and works like a metronome, or like someone ticking off a day in the mind. Each repetition moves us down a step. The speaker sleeps, and the poem breaks into a laugh and a little prayer: "God forgive me!" The exclamation is funny, because sleeping is hardly a sin, but it also shows a guilty conscience. After all that writing, rest feels like a small betrayal of industry. It is the only moment where the speaker's voice rises, and it makes the character vivid in a few syllables.
The next line, "I walked, talking," is the loosest and most mysterious. Who is being talked to? The poem doesn't say. It may be the people the letters were written to, now carried on in the speaker's head, or it may be plain muttering to the air. Either way, the conversation hasn't stopped just because the pen has. The words "walked" and "talking" also echo each other in sound, so the two actions seem to move together, step by step.
Then comes the last line, with the shortest sentence and the plainest word: "I sat." The sounds have run from the busy, hissing "slept" to the clipped "sat." The verb is quiet but not empty. Sitting could mean exhaustion, contentment, or waiting for the next ox or dove to arrive. The poem leaves the question open, and that is where its charm lies.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it gets out of so little. It turns an ordinary day of exchanged words into something ceremonial, and it notices that writing to other people fills us up and wears us out in the same motion. It is also honest about the speaker's flaws, such as the guilt, the napping and the aimless talking, which keeps the poem warm instead of solemn. A good short poem can feel like the end of a long afternoon, and this one captures that mood: busy, then tired, then still.