He is best known for the verses "Bells of Rhymney", from his 1938 Gwalia Deserta (meaning literally "Wasteland of Wales"), which were adapted into a popular folk song.

Then he enrolled in commercial classes in English and bookkeeping, the latter for a Royal Society of Arts examination, which he passed at elementary level.

[5] Consequently, Davies became extremely interested in politics, attending a series of weekly lectures in the local Workmen's Library on the application of Marxism to recent economic history which was taught by a graduate of Ruskin College, Oxford.

[6] In the following year the much-vaunted General Strike of 1926 occurred, the local pit closed and he became unemployed.

[7] In 1929, having passed the Oxford Local Examination at his second attempt, Davies became a pupil-teacher, an honorary post, in his old school, working with his old headmaster.

Davies started teaching in that year in Laysterne Junior Mixed Primary School in Hoxton in Hackney, London, during which he became friends with Dylan Thomas.

[13][14] His work had earlier appeared in the Western Mail, the Merthyr Express, the Daily Herald, the Left Review and Comment (a weekly periodical of poetry, criticism and short stories, edited by Victor Neuburg and Sheila Macleod).

Eliot thought that Davies' poems had a claim to permanence, describing them as "the best poetic document I know about a particular epoch in a particular place".

[18] After his death over two hundred of his manuscript poems and a short verse-play, together with the typescripts of his comprehensive wartime diaries, were deposited at the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth.

And yet I love to wander The early ways I went, And watch from doors and bridges The hills and skies of Gwent.

The verses it contained were inspired partly by such mining disasters as that at Marine Colliery at Cwm near Ebbw Vale in 1927, and by the failure of the 1926 UK General Strike, the Great Depression in the United Kingdom and their combined effects on the South Wales valleys.

More recently some of the other stanzas from Davies' Gwalia Deserta have also been set to music by Welsh performer Max Boyce as the song "When We Walked to Merthyr Tydfil in the Moonlight Long Ago".

[22] The 2017 album Every Valley, by London-based alternative band Public Service Broadcasting, includes a version of Gwalia Deserta XXXVI set to music and re-titled Turn No More.