Seamus Heaney

Fire, earth and water take three of his ten planets each, with a single one in air, and five of the ten are cardinal. The Sun, Mercury and Saturn spread across seventeen degrees of Aries, with the Sun and Saturn a degree and a half apart. The record says Heaney won the Nobel Prize in 1995 for poems rooted in a County Derry farm and the bog bodies of northern Europe, and that his last words were a text message to his wife: noli timere, do not be afraid.

Saturn lies at an awkward angle to Neptune at seven hundredths of a degree, the tightest contact here, and the reading is structure dissolving: disillusionment, effort that seems to drain away, and the slow discovery that something relied upon was not solid. It is also a slow pair, held for everybody born across several years, so the orb is the only remarkable thing about it. A reader looking for the bog bodies in that sentence should be told the sentence was written for an angle and not for a subject.

The Moon sits in quiet contact with Mars at fifteen hundredths of a degree, feelings translating into action cleanly: people who deal with a problem rather than sitting in it. For a poet whose record pairs a working farm with preserved bodies in peat, dealing with a thing rather than sitting in it is a fair description of the method, which was to look directly at what was there. Its sign is certain at thirteen degrees of Aquarius, which handles a feeling by stepping back to examine it, and that is the harder half of the same observation.

Mars sits a fifth of a turn from Jupiter at four tenths of a degree, effort that pays: well-timed action, and the useful ability to commit fully without agonising. A single planet in air, in a poet, is a count worth one line and no conclusion. Mercury and Neptune were the two retrograde planets, Mercury on the sixth degree of Aries. He died at Dublin on 30 August 2013, at seventy four. Mercury stood in easy contact with his natal Mars at fifteen hundredths of a degree that day, reaching the same Mars that the chart's most usable contact runs to. The Moon was at its last quarter and thirty one per cent lit, a phase that rethinks the whole premise rather than the details, and the record's last fact is two words of Latin sent as a text message.