Philip Larkin

Fire takes four of his ten planets, water three, air two and a single one earth. The Sun, Mercury and Neptune sit inside two and three quarter degrees of Leo, which is one of the tighter groups of three in this set. Uranus was the only retrograde planet. The record says Larkin ran the university library in Hull for thirty years and published four thin collections that made him the most quoted English poet of his generation, and that he turned down the laureateship.

Mars sits sixty degrees from Jupiter at just over a fifth of a degree, the tightest contact in the chart, and the reading is effort that pays: well-timed action, sport and enterprise, and the useful ability to commit fully without agonising. Sport and enterprise can be set aside. The last clause is the one worth holding up, because the record is four thin collections across a working lifetime and a laureateship declined, which is a career made almost entirely of not committing. The reading is wrong about the manner and right about the result, since four thin books made him the most quoted poet of his generation.

The site's reading of a Leo Sun ends on a cost: a dependence on an audience that the person will rarely admit to. The record puts both halves of that in one place. Turning down the laureateship is a refusal of the largest available audience, and being the most quoted English poet of a generation is having the largest one anyway. The Sun sits conjunct Neptune at a third of a degree inside that Leo group, the self being porous, with real difficulty knowing where you end and other people begin, which in a poet is the equipment and in a librarian is beside the point.

Mercury sits in mild friction with Saturn at under nine tenths of a degree, thought meeting doubt, read as self-criticism and as a mind that treats its own uncertainty as evidence of stupidity when it is usually evidence of care. Four thin collections in thirty years is the only part of this record that reading gets any purchase on, and it gets a good deal. His Moon sits on the sixth degree of Pisces at noon with Aquarius still possible, so it is left out, and the second closest contact in the death sky goes with it. He died at Hull on 2 December 1985, at sixty three, in the city the record gives him. Venus stood sixty degrees from its own birth place at a quarter of a degree that day and Uranus in easy contact with his natal Mercury at seven tenths. The Moon was disseminating and seventy eight per cent lit.