In barely three dozen words, "Connoisseur" dresses a worldview, dismisses its rivals, crowns a king and ends on something close to tenderness. It starts with a costume. The speaker's cassock, the long robe of a priest, is made of doubt. Doubt is not a private mood here but a vestment worn every day, the uniform of a vocation. The next line borrows more religious language: "I profess" is the vocabulary of vows, yet what gets professed is a refusal, "no light." Light suggests revelation, mystical illumination, perhaps enlightenment in a wider sense. More surprising is the next item on the list, "nature," which the speaker also declines to lean on. The poem has no patience for the consolation that the natural world will redeem us. Then "or other" breaks off at the end of the line and "false way out" arrives in the next, like a verdict. A "way out" is an escape hatch, and the speaker will not use any of them.
The sound of this stanza is tightly controlled. Its lines are three or four syllables long, with two or three stresses each, so each reads like a short clause of a creed. "Doubt" and "out" make the poem's only true rhyme, and it frames the stanza like a latch: the speaker begins in doubt and finds no exit. Nothing is capitalised except "I," and nothing is punctuated, so "no light / or nature or other / false way out" slides along without ceremony, as if the creed were being muttered rather than proclaimed.
The two-line middle stanza is the shortest, and it holds the poem's one certainty. "Death is the one / king of the faithful" takes the language of monotheism, with its one God and its faithful flock, and hands the throne to death. The phrase carries a dry joke: even believers turn out to be subjects of this ruler. There are no adjectives and no hedging. A speaker who doubts everything else lets himself state this flatly. The stanza is also squeezed between two larger ones, and it is hard not to hear the squeeze as part of the meaning.
Then comes "but," the poem's turn. "I serve you" keeps the priestly vocabulary, but the "you" is a surprise. The first direct address in the poem goes not to a god or a lover but to "my little books / my instruments." "Little" and "my" make these objects intimate and small beside the single king of the previous stanza. "Instruments" could mean musical or scientific ones, and the poem doesn't say. Either way, they are things made by human attention, not given from above. The word "other" returns too, in the same position at the end of a line: "my instruments and other / fine things." In stanza one, "other" waved away a heap of false consolations. In stanza three, it gathers what the speaker values, trailing off almost carelessly. It is the same word in the same place with the opposite verdict. "Fine" means delicate or excellent, but it may also faintly echo the musical term *fine*, which marks where a piece ends. That is only a possible overtone, but it suits a poem that keeps death so close.
The title explains how to read this last stanza. A connoisseur is someone who judges and discriminates, who has taste. The speaker is a connoisseur of consolations, refusing the false ones and keeping what he can actually appreciate. The word can also sound a little precious, and the poem lets that irony hover. Serving "little books" in the shadow of a king is a modest, even faintly comic form of worship, and the speaker never claims it will save him.
That modesty is much of what makes the poem worth reading. It offers a secular devotion in miniature. It does not deny death or paper over it, and it does not collapse into despair. The alternative to a false way out is not no way, but careful attention to the made things within reach. The poem also shows how much a few borrowed religious words (cassock, profess, faithful, serve) can do once they are turned to a different purpose. The old structure of faith is still there, but the speaker has moved his loyalty somewhere humbler and more honest.