"Commemorate me with no hero-courageous tomb", Patrick Kavanagh wrote as he sat on a seat on Dublin's Grand Canal. "Just a canal-bank seat for the passer by".
He would be glad to learn that the first part of his wish, at least, has been granted, 31 years after his death. The headstone on his grave in Inniskeen churchyard in Co Monaghan disappeared mysteriously early yesterday morning - into the "stony grey soil of Monaghan", said one disciple of the poet with a sly grin.
The stone was replaced - nobody knows by whom - with a cross made of Burma teak and stepping stones which had marked the grave for many years. In the late 1980s these had been removed, also somewhat mysteriously, following the burial in the plot of Kavanagh's widow, Kathleen.
"The Emerald Isle must bury him in tourist style", the poet wrote in The Paddiad, his bitter satire on Ireland as a spiritual entity, which is probably set in the old Pearl Bar, almost opposite the Irish Times offices in Dublin's Fleet Street.
The cross and stones had originally been provided for the grave by the poet's brother, Dr Peter Kavanagh, a lecturer in the United States. After Kavanagh's widow's burial, they were preserved by him at the family homestead at Mucker, where they stayed until yesterday. A commemoration committee then erected the memorial headstone which has now disappeared.
Dr Kavanagh, who is holidaying in the area, said yesterday he had nothing to do with the removal of the headstone. "It seems to have been taken away by spirits in the night, but I am glad to learn it has gone," he said. "Patrick was the only great Catholic poet in Ireland and the memorial was a pagan monument and an insult to his memory".
However, despite his championing of the oppressed and misrepresented rural Catholic Irish, Kavanagh was not particularly fond of crosses either. He may have preferred to have been laid to rest like Patrick Maguire, the hero of The Great Hunger.
"Patrick Maguire, the old peasant, can neither be damned nor glorified/The graveyard in which he will lie will be just a deep-drilled potato-field/Where the seed gets no chance to come through/To the fun of the sun."
Mr Peter Murphy, chairman of the Kavanagh Society, said yesterday that everyone was "saddened by this controversy, which obviously runs very deep. People don't want to say anything that would inflame the situation further".