Tune me, O Lord, into one harmony
With Thee, one full responsive vibrant chord;
Unto Thy praise all love and melody,
Tune me, O Lord.

Thus need I flee nor death, nor fire,  nor sword:
A little while these be, then cease to be,
And sent by Thee not these should  be abhorred.

Devil and world, gird me with strength to flee,
To flee the flesh, and arm me with
Thy word:  As Thy Heart is to my heart, unto Thee
Tune me, O Lord.

From Verses (1893)
Christina Rossetti (1830-94)

THE Victorian poet and Pre-Raphaelite Christina Rossetti has been rediscovered in recent times, not just for her sensual masterpiece Goblin Market, but for her devotional verse and position as a theological commentator in the Oxford Movement.

As with the "missalisation" of the Tractarian poet John Keble's elaborately decorated The Christian Year, Rossetti presented her 1893 collection as a devotional work - like a service book - rather than just a sequence of poems: the idea was to link the poems ever more closely to prayer, as distinct from mere reading.

Widely admired for her acoustic imagination, the tightly controlled musicality of her verse, Rossetti here, as in other poems, creates a privileged "space". This is akin to the space provided by liturgy, which the reader can inhabit, consciously adopting the position of God's instrument, and in which he or she can ponder the dilemma of how to respond to God's love appropriately.

Music itself is the subject of this poem, which takes from George Herbert's "Deniall" ("When my devotions could not pierce . . .") the intimate image of the speaker's being "tuned" to God. For Rossetti, as for Herbert, music is transformative, a heightened form of prayer.

Music, like the poem itself, is a virtual sacrament, marking the boundary between the physical and the spiritual, and mediating between the speaker and God. Fascinated by the celestial imagery of the book of Revelation, with its myriad heavenly choirs united in singing hymns to Christ, Rossetti would also have been aware from her reading of the church Fathers of the common patristic use of music as a powerful metaphor for unity among Christians. As St Ignatius of Antioch prays in the first century, for example, Christians are to be "like the strings of a harp", and the result "a hymn of praise to Jesus Christ from minds that are in unison, and affections that are in harmony".

This visible unity does not require the suppression of difference, any more than God's "tuning" of us, God's instruments, in prayer causes the human and divine notes to collapse into each other. Just as the two notes sound in and through each other, yet are heard as irreducibly distinct, so, within the visionary space of this poem, we can pray for courage faithfully to endure in the Christian life against the disharmonious trinity of "flesh, world, and devil", and all that threatens to collapse the clear resonance of different and distinctive voices.

Far from an other-worldly turning in on oneself, this new, heavenly way of relating naturally leads to a turning outwards - in acceptance of the plurality of voices in our world.

For Rossetti, as for us, harmony requires that we position ourselves as God's instruments, deliberately and prayerfully altering our behaviour and our attitudes in conformity to Christ, so that we can hear each other, and God, better.

The Revd Anna Macham is Priest-in-Charge of St Philip's, Camberwell, in south London.