The poem opens on a small jolt of astonishment: "the old woman is alive still." The word order tilts slightly away from ordinary speech, which would say "still alive." That tilt leaves "still" at the end of the line, where it can mean both "yet" and "motionless," as if the speaker were pausing to take in the fact. The next line, "a matter of wonder," is a fragment with no verb, and the speaker doesn't explain it. We never learn who the woman is, how she is connected to the speaker, or what her letters say. The poem keeps all of that offstage and attends to one thing: how a very long life reaches another person.
The second stanza answers in physical terms. "her 100 years find me / in the very handwriting." The grammar gives the action to the years, not the woman. They "find" the speaker, like travellers who had his address all along. Time becomes something that moves through space and arrives. The phrase "the very handwriting" insists on exactness. Her age is not reported here but present in the shape of the letters. The poem doesn't describe that handwriting, whether shaky, looped or upright, and that restraint seems deliberate. What matters is that the hand is hers and is still making marks.
The title does quiet work here. A "correspondent" is someone who writes letters, but the root verb "correspond" also means to match or to answer. A reading the text allows is that the handwriting corresponds to the life behind it, and that the speaker, by receiving it, is drawn into the exchange.
The diction is where the poem turns warm. "Venerable" is a word we usually save for cathedrals, ancient trees and respected elders. Applying it to ink moves the reverence from the woman onto the stuff she writes with, which is humble and cheap. The line break then does something clever. "her venerable ink and plain" can be read for a moment as though the ink itself were both venerable and plain, before "uncut paper" arrives to complete the thought. "Uncut" is ambiguous. It might mean untrimmed edges, unruled or unadorned sheets, or simply paper left as it came. Judging by the context, the poem wants all of these. The materials are as unembellished as the poem's own language. Even "matter" in "a matter of wonder" seems to link to the physical world, since ink and paper are matter too, and the wonder lives in them.
The form follows the same plainness. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, and the age is given as the numeral "100," not as a word. The effect is of a note jotted down, close to the letter it describes. Line lengths shift with the sense. The first stanza is two short lines. The second is a single sentence that keeps lengthening, and "her venerable ink and plain" is the fullest line, rolling over the many syllables of "venerable." Then the poem drops to the two beats of "uncut paper," a short, blunt landing. Small sound echoes hold it together: the v of "very" and "venerable," and the p of "plain" and "paper." Because the last line has no full stop, the sentence stays open, and the correspondence feels as if it could continue.
The poem is significant for what it declines to do. Poems about the very old often look backward and mourn. This one marvels at presence: she "is alive," in the present tense, and her life is still arriving. The speaker is also the one being found, not the one who reaches out. That stance is humble and grateful. Reading between the lines, the emphasis on handwriting and paper may also suggest how much more of a person a hand-written page carries than a typed message does, though the poem never argues this directly. In a handful of plain words, it turns a hundred years from a number into something you can hold.