It is, on the face of it, a strange undertaking to write a theological account of a poet who it is not clear ever read much of the Bible, and one of whose few poems ostensibly to take on religion as its central theme (‘Christ, the Man’ from his 1911 collection Songs of Joy) begins: ‘Lord, I say nothing; I profess /No faith in Thee nor Christ Thy Son.’ A line like this would seem an openand-shut case from the horse's mouth – look for nature in Davies, look for social criticism, look for the privileging of the imagination over the intellect, but don't look for God.

Poems, however, are poems precisely because they so rarely are open and shut. Davies is interesting from a theological standpoint not because he consciously engages with religious dogma, nor because he deliberately defends a particular creed, but because aspects of both his life and work are in sympathy with certain images and ideas of Christ which can validly be extrapolated from the Gospels and through which we can trace distinct theological and historical trajectories. Indeed, the more one reads Davies's work – both the poems (which range from the intensely disciplined, metrically skilled and visually lovely, on the one hand, to the excessive artificiality of the weaker Georgians, on the other) and the prose (with its minutely detailed and highly sympathetic insights into poverty and vagrancy) – the more certain images of Christ in the Gospels are called to mind. Davies's rejection of social convention, the antipathy towards waged work, the sympathetic eye towards the poor and abandoned, the impatience with the airs of the wealthy, the imaginative use of metaphor and parable – all seem to find their analogue in the Gospels with the obvious difference that Davies has no sense of a divine mission: which is not to say that aspects of theology do not provide a strong undercurrent that informs portions of his work.

‘Christ, the Man’ is a case in point as, despite its protestations, it follows a quite clear theological thread running through the Enlightenment and entangling itself, prior to that, with some of the thorniest conflicts of the early Church.