Odysseas Elytis

Not one of his ten planets sits in a fire sign. Water takes five, earth three and air two, with four of the ten fixed and four mutable. The Sun, Mercury and Jupiter fill thirteen degrees of Scorpio, the sign that commits totally to whatever it has chosen. The record is two facts: Elytis was a Greek poet and a Nobel laureate.

The Moon sits in easy contact with Mercury at thirteen hundredths of a degree, close enough to call exact, and the reading is feelings that articulate easily: a good listener, somebody who explains difficult things kindly, and an understanding of other people that was never trained into them. In a poet that is about as plain a fit as this project gets, and the orb is the reason it is worth printing rather than the fit. Both planets are certain, the Moon at fifteen degrees of Pisces and Mercury at fifteen of Scorpio.

No fire at all, with five planets in water, is the other fact to take from this chart, and poetry is one of the few working lives where a reader will not immediately ask where the drive went. The chart answers anyway. Mars stands at an awkward angle to the Sun at under four tenths of a degree, drive and identity arguing, and in mild friction with Neptune at half a degree, which is will without direction: tiredness with no cause, action undermined by uncertainty, and anger that goes underground rather than out. Venus sits sixty degrees from that same Neptune at just under a degree and in easy contact with Uranus at the same orb, a gift for beauty on one side and unconventional arrangements that work on the other. Mars itself was retrograde on the ninth degree of Gemini, and Mars, Saturn, Neptune and Pluto were the four retrograde planets.

He died at Athens on 18 March 1996, at eighty four. The Moon came back to its own natal degree that day, inside half a degree of it, and from there stood in easy contact with his natal Mercury at just over a third, which is the pairing the whole chart is built on, with Jupiter sixty degrees from that Mercury at under half a degree as well. Three separate contacts reached one pair on the day. The Moon was balsamic and one per cent lit, a phase that finishes things, lets them go, and is already looking past them.