This, surely, is one of the most poetic of Christmas carols:

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Christina Rossetti’s language is so simple, and yet the imagery is so rich and original with its invocation of the natural world, of weather and winter, water and snow.

In a new study published this year of the Victorian poet’s life, Professor Emma Mason places Rossetti as a spiritual pioneer of “ecotheology” – a theology that is in tune with ecology and the natural world, in the tradition of St Francis of Assisi.