Four short lines, no punctuation, not a single capital letter, and yet a whole evening fits inside: the dark, a table, a meal, and a speaker who is entirely at ease being by themselves. The poem's central idea is that solitude and conversation are not opposites. Alone at night, the speaker is still in correspondence, with other people, with words, and with the night itself.
Everything turns on the word "letters", which the poem lets mean two things at once. In the first line, "letters answer letters", we can picture envelopes crossing paths, one message prompting the next. We can just as easily picture the alphabet, marks on a page responding to other marks, one word calling up another. The title supports both readings. "Correspondence" names an exchange of mail, but it also means a matching-up, one thing fitting another. The poem plays on both. Because the line has no human agent (nobody writes or replies, the letters simply do it), writing seems to carry on by its own momentum.
The second line repeats the first and stretches it: "letters at night answer the night". The same chain-like pattern returns, but now the second term is no longer more letters. It is the night. This is the poem's quiet leap. Black marks on a pale page do resemble small pieces of darkness, so the letters can be seen as the night answering itself in miniature. The words are also an answer in the ordinary sense: the night is silent and large, and the letters are what a person says back to it. The repeated "night" and the soft echo of "answer… answer" make the line feel like a call and its reply packed into one breath.
Then the poem turns inward and domestic: "where I eat all alone". The "where" grabs hold of "the night" and turns it into a place, almost a room with a table in it. The verb "eat" is plain and physical, a surprise after all the abstraction. It brings the body in, and it invites a playful thought: if the letters are what the speaker is surrounded by, perhaps reading and writing are a kind of nourishment too. The poem never says so, but the placement of this line right after the talk of letters nudges us toward the idea.
The final line is the most delicate. "All alone" could sound sad, since the phrase usually does, but the break after it gives the speaker a chance to correct that expectation: "with pleasure". The preposition matters. Pleasure is not the reason for the solitude or its reward; it is the speaker's companion at the table. There is also an idiom hiding here. "With pleasure" is what we say when we accept an invitation or agree to a request. Read that way, the last line is one more answer in a poem full of answers, a polite and happy yes to the night's invitation.
Formally, the poem is very economical. There is no rhyme, and the rhythm is loose but noticeable. The opening line falls into a gentle back-and-forth of stresses (LET-ters AN-swer LET-ters), like a ball being passed. The second line is the longest, as though it widens to take in the whole night, and the third and fourth contract again, ending on the soft, unstressed final syllable of "pleasure". The lack of capitals and full stops matters too. Without a period, the poem never quite closes, which suits a correspondence that could always receive another reply.
What makes it worth reading is how much it does with so little. In a handful of plain, lowercase words it reframes being alone as a form of company and treats writing as a kind of conversation that doesn't need a second person in the room. It asks us to notice that an ordinary scene, one person eating in the dark, can be full of exchange. The poem offers no argument, just a mood of contentment, and the reader is left to work out why this solitary supper feels so complete.