Wilfred Owen

Fire, air and water take three of his ten planets each, with a single one in earth, and four of the ten are cardinal. The Sun sits on the twenty eighth degree of Pisces and Jupiter on the twenty eighth of Aries, so those two make a contact across a sign boundary at just over a quarter of a degree. The record says Owen wrote the best known English poetry of the First World War in about a year, was killed crossing a canal a week before the armistice, and that the telegram reached his mother as the bells rang.

The reading for that Sun and Jupiter contact is growth without much friction: opportunity that arrives through being well thought of, and an easy faith that things will work out. It is the second closest contact in the chart, and it is printed here because leaving it out would be a kind of editing. An easy faith that things will work out, in a man killed seven days before the end of the war, is about the cruellest thing this vocabulary has produced, and it is cruel by accident: the reading was written for an angle and handed to everybody born across those few days.

What the chart offers about the work rather than the ending is slighter. The Sun sits a fifth of a turn from Neptune at a degree and two fifths, imagination available without cost: creative facility, and a natural, undramatic kind of empathy, which in a poet whose subject was other men's deaths is the nearest this chart comes to the poetry. Saturn sits in quiet contact with Uranus at nine hundredths of a degree, the tightest contact of all, practical innovation, and that is a slow pair belonging to a generation rather than to him.

His Moon sits on the third degree of Aries at noon with Pisces still possible, so it is left out, and a three planet group comes down to two. Saturn and Uranus were the two retrograde planets. He was killed at Ors on 4 November 1918, at twenty five. Mercury stood in direct opposition to his natal Mars at a tenth of a degree that day and Jupiter square his natal Mercury at under three tenths. The Moon was new and nought per cent lit, and the standing reading printed for that phase is that it starts things without waiting to see the whole of them. The record has already told the reader he died a week before the end. The phase appears here because it was what it was, and nothing in it is a comment on that week.