“Correspondence,” a short poem by Léopold Sédar Senghor, was first published in Poèmes perdus (Lost Poems), included in his final collection of original poetry, Oeuvre poétique. However, “according to the author’s preface, these poems are not new as such, but were previously unpublished” (Dixon xxxviii).

While many of Senghor’s poems are easily related to the theme of the Negritude movement, some of those in Poèmes perdus are not but “offer valuable evidence of . . . his debt to a wide range of French and American poets.” According to Melvin Dixon, “[t]he rhyme and quatrain form of ‘Correspondence’ reveal Senghor’s early interest in the prosody of the truncated sonnet” (Dixon xxxvii–xxxviii). “Correspondence” conveys the introspective emotional landscape of its persona and the author’s experimentation with language and his discourse on its capacity to communicate.

“Correspondence” is written in three stanzas, two quatrains, and a final couplet, with each pair of lines rhymed in the original French. The first stanza situates the speaker in a “friendly vigil night” (Stanza 1, l. 1) in which he undertakes the “correspondence” indicated by the title of the poem. The act of writing draws the addressee closer to the letter writer: his or her “nimble presence softens the light” (1.2). The act of writing “[o]n paper white as a beach” (1.3)—“beach” suggesting a distance separated by water—is imaged as an attempt to touch the addressee; the persona’s “hands search” through writing “to reach” the “dream hands” (1.4) of the one who is present only in memory.

The second stanza makes use of mixed metaphors and introduces the reader to three additional images in the poem—all conveying the distance between the writer and the addressee and commenting on the act of writing. The writer and his “[d]ear one” here “travel by the express train’s silent leap” (2.1)—images suggesting distance and the prospect that the act of corresponding will allow the writer to travel with the one who is far away, collapsing the distance between them. The “unknown eyelashes” that “peep / On the night of [the addressee’s] wide eyes” (2.2–3) convey the movement of the train and indicate not only that the act of correspondence allows the writer to enter into and look upon the addressee but also that the act of writing (taken in by the “wide eyes” of the reader when received) can collapse time as well as space. Writing is imaged here as an act of “waving scarves on the horizon skies!” (2.4)—allowing even sight across a vast distance.

The final couplet of “Correspondence” adds a second layer of meaning to the poem: “Will I ever again see the bleeding city / Where rises the endless lament of minarets?” (3.1–2). Here (and in other poems) imagery links people to landscapes and physical places. Yet shifting from second person (the direct address of the “you” for whom the correspondence is intended), these lines may imply that what the writer longs for is not a person, but a place. The image of the towers of Muslim temples suggests a possible longing for Senegal, Senghor’s homeland, which is more than 90 percent Muslim. But the personification of the city and the imagery of “bleeding” and of “endless lament” may suggest more than a projection of the writer’s emotions onto the city. Depending on the time of its composition, such imagery may refer to the political turmoil concurrent with the independence of French colonies in Africa such as Algeria and Tunisia.

Bibliography
Senghor, Léopold Sédar. The Collected Poetry. Translated and with an introduction by Melvin Dixon. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991.