Ezra Pound

Fire and water take three of his ten planets each, with two apiece in earth and air, and nothing is missing from the balance. Five of the ten are fixed. His Moon's sign is certain at nine degrees of Leo. The chart holds no closed figure of any kind. Saturn, Neptune and Pluto were the three retrograde planets. The record says Pound edited The Waste Land into the poem it is and promoted half the modernists, then broadcast for Mussolini and spent twelve years in a psychiatric hospital instead of a treason trial.

The second half of that record is where a reader will want the chart to go, and two contacts here would let them. Mars sits square Neptune at under four fifths of a degree, will without direction, glossed as anger that goes underground rather than out, and Saturn sits in mild friction with that same Neptune at a degree and a third, structure dissolving, read as disillusionment and as the slow discovery that something relied upon was not solid. Neither of those explains a political position, and a chart that appeared to explain one would be doing something this entry will not do.

The first half of the record is the half the chart actually meets. The Sun sits a fifth of a turn from Mars at under a fifth of a degree, effort coming easily and in a person's own interest, read as people who do not need to be talked into starting. The Sun sits in easy contact with Saturn at under three quarters, steady competence and responsibility trusted early, and the Moon sits in quiet contact with that same Saturn at four tenths, reliability in a crisis without much need for reassurance. Three contacts agreeing on competence, in a man whose first credit is editing somebody else's poem into the version everybody now reads.

That is an unusual shape for a record to take: the chart fits the service and says nothing usable about the disgrace. No closed figure at all is the structural note, and it means there is no pressure point to report. The Sun sits square the Moon at just over a degree, the self being built and the comfort required wanting different things. He died at Venice on 1 November 1972, at eighty seven, two days after his birthday. Jupiter stood square his natal Uranus at four tenths of a degree that day and Mercury opposite his natal Pluto at under three fifths. The Moon was at its last quarter and nineteen per cent lit, a phase that rethinks the whole premise rather than the details.