John Keats

Fire takes a single one of his ten planets, with three each in earth, air and water, and five of the ten are mutable with only one cardinal. The Sun, Venus and Neptune sit inside six degrees of Scorpio. The record says Keats published for four years, was savaged by reviewers, and died of tuberculosis in Rome at twenty five, and that he asked for his gravestone to say only: here lies one whose name was writ in water.

Venus stands at an awkward angle to Saturn at under three fifths of a degree, and the reading is warmth meeting a wall: feeling unworthy, delay or coldness in affection, and a person who withholds first in order not to be refused. Feeling unworthy is usually the hardest clause in this vocabulary to test, because records give what happened to somebody and not what they thought of themselves. This one gives both. A man who asked for a gravestone saying his name was written in water left a statement of his own worth, in his own words, and it is the shortest one in the set.

That makes this one of the very few entries where an internal reading can be set against something internal rather than against an event. It is still a generic reading, printed for everybody born across those days, and the epitaph is still his. Mercury sits sixty degrees from Jupiter at two thirds of a degree, learning that comes easily: breadth, genuine curiosity, and an ability to make complicated things sound simple, which for a poet with four published years is the contact about the work rather than about its reception.

The Sun sits sixty degrees from Uranus at nine tenths, independence without a fight: people who are unusual and untroubled by being unusual, which the reviewers in that record contradict and the poems do not. His Moon sits on the twenty seventh degree of Gemini at noon with Cancer still possible, so it is left out. Saturn and Pluto were the two retrograde planets. He died at Rome on 23 February 1821, at twenty five, of a disease nothing in this chart contains. Pluto stood in direct opposition to his natal Mars at just over a quarter of a degree that day. The Moon was disseminating and sixty seven per cent lit, a phase that passes on what was worked out and needs it to land.