Ted Hughes

Earth takes four of his ten planets, with two apiece in fire, air and water, and nothing is missing from the balance. Five of the ten are cardinal. The chart holds a T-square on Venus, Jupiter and Saturn, which uses no Moon and therefore survives an unknown birth hour. Saturn and Uranus were the two retrograde planets. The record says Hughes was Poet Laureate for fourteen years and married to Sylvia Plath, that he said nothing publicly about her death for thirty five years, and that he then published Birthday Letters months before he died.

Mercury sits sixty degrees from Pluto at just over four tenths of a degree, the tightest usable contact here, and the reading is depth without strain, glossed as strategy, persuasion and an unusual tolerance for uncomfortable information. That last clause is the one the record measures, and it measures it in years. Thirty five years of public silence about the thing everybody wanted him to speak about is tolerance for uncomfortable information expressed as duration, and the book that ended it arrived with months left.

The record also contains another person's death, and that is where this entry stops. Her death belongs to her and to a chart that is not this one, so nothing here reaches for it. What the record attributes to him is the silence and the book, and those two are the whole of what a reading can be weighed against. A poet's working life is the only thing on offer in this record that a chart has any business describing.

His Moon sits on the twenty fourth degree of Taurus at noon with Gemini still possible, so it is left out, and three of the six closest contacts go with it, including the tightest in the chart, a hard angle between the Sun and the Moon at a quarter of a degree. The Sun sits sixty degrees from Mars at under nine tenths, effort coming easily and in a person's own interest. He died in London on 28 October 1998, at sixty eight. Mercury stood square his natal Sun at over half a degree that day and Uranus in easy contact with his natal Venus at just over two thirds. The Moon was at its first quarter and fifty per cent lit.