Sylvia Plath27 October 1932, 2:10 PM EST
Boston, MA, USA
Placidus Houses, True Node
Geocentric, Tropical
(Data and Photo Source Notes)
Fig. 1. Sylvia Plath's natal astrological chart. The chart's ascendant point is at 29 degrees 22 minutes of Aquarius (at the 9:00 position, were this a clock), and its descendant point is at the 3:00 position. The chart, like every chart, is divided into 12 "houses." At the right is Plath's unusually "crowded" natal House 7, sector of marriage and partnerships, occupied by the Moon, Venus, the Moon's South Node, Jupiter, and Neptune.
"Fixed stars" are all the stars in the sky assigned to the units called constellations. The brighter of these fixed stars, if prominent at the time of birth, are said to influence an individual's character and life events. Given the resonance of the concluding words "[f]ixed stars / Govern a life," in Sylvia Plath's poem "Words," I wanted to identify the fixed stars in Plath's natal astrological chart and discuss their significance in Western astrology, the type practiced by Plath's husband Ted Hughes, who all his adult life used astrology as an augury and for character analysis. Plath's readership will then be familiar with "fixed stars" as a concept and with the names and significance of the fixed stars in Sylvia Plath's natal chart, information neither Plath nor Hughes left in writing.
In our century, the only excuse for attention to astrology is that there appears to be something to it. Whether fixed stars actually can or do "govern a life," or whether Plath or Hughes believed that, and which of the pair was first to say so are infinitely debatable issues.[1] Taking the subject about as seriously as Hughes did, and using, as he did, Western astrology's classic geocentric method, we begin with the facts of Sylvia Plath's birth. Plath was born October 27, 1932 at 2:10 p.m. in Boston, Massachusetts. Mathematical formulae and atlases terrestrial and sidereal permit astrologers to draw up from this information an astronomically accurate, two-dimensional 360-degree diagram called a natal chart or birth chart, uniquely Plath's and forever hers. [Fig. 1] It will lead us to Plath's natal fixed stars.
Plath's natal Sun was in the zodiac sign Scorpio and the Moon in Libra. Popular astrology calls the Sun sign fundamental, but to an astrologer every natal chart's defining factor is the exact degree of the zodiac sign that happened to be rising, or ascendant, at the eastern horizon at the moment of birth. The hour and minute of birth determine this ascendant point, from which the rest of the chart unfolds. Plath's rising sign was Aquarius, and her ascendant point was 29 degrees 22 minutes of Aquarius. Modern astrological computer software compared with Ted Hughes's analog calculations produces the same ascendant degree, the same 12 zodiacal signs and "houses," each with 30 degrees of arc, and the same planetary placements.[2] Ted Hughes's rough sketch of Plath's natal chart, plus a second chart labeled "Her book accepted / at 9 a.m. 6 Feb. 1960," appear on a notebook page shown on the British Library's website.[3] "Her" book was Plath's The Colossus, its manuscript accepted for publication at that date and time, and Hughes drew up the equivalent of its natal chart.
After establishing the chart, astrologers step back from astronomy and geometry into the older, symbolic science of astrology that holds that conditions on earth and in the heavens are correspondent. Exactly how rests on traditional lore 4000 years deep, back to the union of the Sumerians, fixed-star watchers, with the Babylonians, inventors of the zodiac. Like many laypeople, Sylvia Plath at first imagined that astrology was "psychic" or intuitive, requiring a knack, but that is never true: Chart interpretation and prognostication are skills and arts anyone can acquire through instruction, readings, case studies, and practice; one might even add to the literature by becoming a scholar.[4] Astrologers use case studies as jurists use precedents. Hughes in his notebook calculated and sketched the natal charts of celebrities such as T.S. Eliot and Sigmund Freud apparently seeking to uncover in them significators of their genius or fame.[5] Hughes later began and then abandoned a study of celebrities born with the Sun in Capricorn.[6] He was well-informed, but nothing indicates Ted Hughes as an astrologer had a unique approach or as a prognosticator was better or worse than average, and he did not claim to be so.[7] Astrology was for him a tool, guide, and inspiration.
Like every astrologer, Hughes was obsessed with his own natal chart and by May 1956 had compared it, for compatibility, with that of an attractive American poetess he had met, crowing in a letter to his sister Olwyn, a fellow astrologer, "[h]er Mars smack on my Sun . . . very appropriate."[8] This "appropriate" Mars-Sun alignment in the sign Leo augured, for Sylvia Plath, her ideal male, and for Hughes, energy to make good on his inclinations. Plath supplied the labor required to win for Hughes recognition as a poet. In turn Hughes introduced to Plath fascinating new fields of study and pursuits including astrology, Tarot-card reading, and occultism of the Victorian parlor-game type: Ouija, hypnosis. A recent astrological reference book calls a Mars-Sun conjunction, such as the couple had, "a dynamic comparative combination which can lead to much mutual accomplishment. It can also produce severe ego conflicts. If the individuals are to get along harmoniously, they must respect each other's independence and free will."[9]
Lines and phrases in Plath's earlier poems, such as "The asteroids turn traitor in the air, / And planets plot with old elliptic cunning" do not prove Plath "knew astrology" before she met Hughes or had more than a layman's interest in it.[10] She learned from Hughes that her natal Venus occupied House 7 of her birth chart, because the surviving typescripts of Plath's abortive first novel Falcon Yard are of a chapter titled "Venus in the Seventh," short for "seventh astrological house." Plath seems not to have absorbed any further the imagery or language of astrology. Astrological references are absent from the poems in The Colossus (1960) and Plath's edit of Ariel (2004). Plath's poems mention the Moon so frequently it has been called her totem, but astrology has no totems.
One's natal chart never alters, but far from decreeing "a fate set in stone," a natal chart, like a map, reveals a donnée, the lay of the land. An astrologer can read from a natal chart the client's inclinations, gifts, and weaknesses, and can point to and explain the telling factors. Clients are then free to choose how to act on their astrological givens. Neither occult, meaning "hidden," nor mystical, from a root word meaning "eyes and lips closed," the maps and mechanics of the cosmos are plain for all to see, and 4000 years of testimony is open to anyone wanting to know what it means and how to get the best of it. That fixed stars might be said to "govern" a life does not mean fixed stars "dictate" or decree a particular and inevitable "fate." Being helplessly star-crossed happens only in drama.
Claudius Ptolemy, who some astrologers characterize as the founder of Western astrology and author of its 'bible', cautioned that astrology is not able to reveal everything and that people own their own futures except when nature, meaning specifically earthly phenomena, has the last word.[11] For example, volcanoes and earthquakes, generated by earthly and not cosmic forces, are not astrologically predictable. Swim out beyond the limit of your strength and you will drown, not because stars and planets ordained it but because your choice defied the body's natural limitations.
Hughes knew well the works of Dante and Shakespeare, and both of them paraphrased a universally recognized astrological dictum, its exact English wording credited to Sir Francis Bacon: "The stars impel; they do not compel." "As above, so below" is a Hermetic axiom, not an astrological one. Sylvia Plath might have believed in astrological "fate" and foreordination, but Hughes knew better. He did not leave his completed manuscripts to an "inevitable" "fate" "compelled" by stars or planets. Instead he calculated and specified for his publishers astrologically auspicious publication dates.[12]
While not incorrect, a person's Sun sign alone is a meager basis for character analysis.[13] Put succinctly, the Sun sign shows what the individual wants, the Moon sign what they feel they need, and the rising sign how they go about getting it.[14] In reference to Sylvia Plath, a Sun in Scorpio native is sensual, intense, possessive, and driven. A Libra Moon native tends to be artistic, judgmental, and critical. A person with Aquarius rising presents as chilly, cerebral, focused, and less interested in people than in attention or acclaim. The odds of being born with Aquarius rising are 1 in 12, so that is not special, but
Western astrology says an ascendant point at 29 degrees, in Plath's case 29 degrees of Aquarius, is "critical" or afflicted; not good. At 29 degrees of any zodiac sign, an ascendant point or a planet is said to approaching the end of its journey through the sign's 30 degrees and is weak and depleted, to be refreshed only by its upcoming entry into 0 degrees of the following sign, which in Plath's case would have been Pisces.
A natal ascendant point at 29 degrees is like a tire with a slow leak. It destabilizes the entire chart and correspondingly the native and their prospects. Had Sylvia Plath been born at 2:14 p.m. instead of 2:10 she would have had 0 degrees of Pisces rising, a fresh and invigorated ascendant degree. Plath horoscopes in print and online—her natal chart is a popular case study—sometimes argue that Plath's birth time of 2:10 must be wrong, that the sign Pisces was surely rising at her birth because Pisces is "the sign of the poet." That neglects the fact that Plath was not solely a poet. The odds of being born with an ascendant at a critical degree are 1 in 30.
Plath's birth chart has seven fixed stars influential by position or eminence. Fixed stars, out beyond the planets, provide a layer of information Western astrologers find so rarified that they commonly consider only one fixed star: Algol, the notorious Demon Star, Eye of the Gorgon, in the sign Taurus. Plath's chart has an Algol contact we will discuss. Fixed stars were to the ancient Egyptians and Greeks a chart's most important elements, but Western astrology, codified around 150 C.E., like the Romans gave planets first place in chart analysis and prognostication. Fixed stars gradually became no more than a "dressy backcloth" for the planets, which are not fixed but instead travel through the zodiac's constellations on predictable tracks and schedules.[15]
Much fixed star lore was thereafter lost except for scraps such as the manuscript by "Anonymous of 379," the oldest textual source. Australian astrologer Bernadette Brady in 1998 single-handedly restored attention to fixed stars with her authoritative Brady's Book of Fixed Stars, synthesizing data from the most prominent published sources of fixed-star lore.
Interpreters agree that fixed stars most influence a natal chart when positioned within one degree of a natal planet or within one degree of a chart's four cardinal points—ascendant, descendant, midheaven, or nadir. An allowance of one degree out of 360 so restricts the possibilities that some astrologers grant fixed stars influence when the stars are two, three, or even five degrees apart from the sweet spot. In my opinion, one degree of separation merits attention. Two degrees is an indicator. Fixed stars three degrees from conjunction are too far from a conjunction to count; we are, after all, crediting with influence pinpoints of light trillions of miles away.[16]
Fixed stars of greater magnitude have greater influence on the life, the more so if they are among what 18th-century astronomers styled "The Four Royal Stars of Persia": Aldebaran, Regulus, Antares, and Fomalhaut.[17] Absent any proof they were ever "royal" or "Persian," astrologers still honor these stars' historical role as heralds of the four seasons and also the evidence drawn from case studies indicating that these stars wield power as tradition says they do. This matters because the "royal star" Regulus is Sylvia Plath's most influential fixed star.
In a natal chart there are two types of fixed stars: natal and heliacal. Let us first discuss Plath's natal fixed stars.
Regulus on Plath's Descendant Point
Fixed star Regulus is a fiery blue-white first-magnitude star, "the heart of the Lion," in the constellation Leo. Regulus at 28 degrees 53 minutes of Leo was on Plath's descendant point, opposite Plath's ascendant. The star Regulus had set in the west less than one clock minute before her birth.
Regulus, meaning "prince" or "little king," when present at any chart's any cardinal point signifies fame equivalent to royal status. U.S. President Donald Trump has Regulus on his ascendant. It is said that a fixed star on the ascendant shows its influence at the native's birth or in youth, and a star at the descendant in old age or after death. An astrologer might then be tempted to interpret Plath's Regulus as fame bestowed posthumously, as in fact it was. Yet a good astrologer always wants more light on the subject, and perhaps turns to comparative studies using the charts of public figures.
I found few public figures/celebrities born with Regulus on the descendant. One was movie actress and Plath contemporary Audrey Hepburn, born May 4, 1929. Apart from their Regulus placements, Plath's and Hepburn's natal charts are not alike. Hepburn lived a full life, and while living won for her artistry and charitable work acclaim that has long survived her (she died in 1993). Fixed stars identify Audrey Hepburn rather than Marilyn Monroe as Plath's Hollywood counterpart, and their biographical parallels, such as absent fathers with rightist politics, are fascinating.[18] A critic pointed out that Hepburn as an actress "seemed drawn to films focused on re-invention": The princess in Roman Holiday pretends to be a commoner; the nun in The Nun's Story embraces and then rejects religious life; petty crook Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's pines for money and status, and in the most iconic Hepburn photograph wears a diamond tiara, like royalty.[19]
Tradition promises those with a prominent Regulus worldly success, with the hazard of a sudden downfall. Brady specifies that the downfall is the temptation to take revenge (Brady, 263). Sylvia Plath was spiteful and could be vengeful, and did not spare herself.[20] Her suicide in 1963 and the highly irregular publication of her creative works conjured from critics fantastical reinventions of Plath as a "priestess cultivating her hysteria,"[21] a "literary dragon,"[22] "psychotic," a feminist martyr, a man-hater, a woman-hater, a Briton, bathing beauty, poster child for mental illness, fine artist, a good or terrible wife and mother, a witch, and so on. Hepburn had the time, money, and support to craft her own image and legacy. Plath did not.
Also born with Regulus descendant: the multiracial Hollywood actress Merle Oberon, a fabulous beauty who played Cathy to Laurence Olivier's Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1939). She was born February 19, 1911, in India to a 12-yearold and had to hide and lie about her origins all of her life, only to be "outed" by a nephew's roman à clef and, after her death, a documentary film. Oberon married Hollywood film director Alexander Korda, and when he was knighted for wartime film work she became Lady Korda, noblewoman.
Rukbat and Deneb Algedi at Plath's Ascendant Point
Two small fixed stars were within one degree of Plath's ascendant point. Third-magnitude star Rukbat was nearest it. Arab astronomers named this star in the constellation Sagittarius for the stellar archer's knee. Brady says Rukbat represents the archer's armpit, a locus of strength as he draws back his bow. An individual with Rukbat rising might be a "rock of Gibraltar" for others, yet also stubborn, to their own detriment (Brady, 296).
Just 0 degrees 4 seconds behind the fixed star Rukbat was Deneb Algedi, Arabic for "tail of the kid goat," a second-magnitude star nonetheless the brightest in the dim constellation Capricorn. Interpretations of Deneb Algedi rising are contradictory and inconclusive, and when this is so, comparative studies can again be helpful. President Abraham Lincoln was born with Deneb Algedi at 1 degree 12 minutes from his ascendant. Brady says this star, although not strong, "bestows a sense of justice, of wanting to be a 'savior'," adding that Saint Teresa of Calcutta, a Roman Catholic missionary nun who cared for the poor and dying, had Deneb Algedi rising (304). Saint Teresa and self-obsessed "save me" scene-maker Plath seem like polar opposites, but that is a superficial judgement.[23] Born in Albania on August 26, 1910, the world-famous and picturesque Nobel Peace Prize-winning Teresa shrewdly banked billions of dollars in donations, and while publicly doctrinaire had a crisis of faith that tortured her for years. Had Plath and Teresa met, I think they would have found commonalities, but besides white skin, what the two women might have had in common one feeble fixed star does not tell, and an honest astrologer will not pretend to know. Fixed-star astrologer Elisabeth Ebertin-Hoffmann in the 1930s wrote that Deneb Algedi indicates integrity and inventiveness, and gives as an example Berthold Brecht, a radical, contrarian, "nihilistic" playwright. Brecht, however, had Deneb Algedi in conjunction with his natal Sun, not his natal ascendant point (Ebertin-Hoffman, 77).
For the birth of Sylvia Plath one might have expected more prominent and distinguished ascendant stars. The royal star Fomalhaut, granter of creative genius and mental instability, at Plath's birth was about to rise, yet was farther than three degrees from Plath's ascendant point.[24] Consider then how the two humbler fixed stars might be appropriate governors of Plath's afflicted ascendant degree. Rukbat perhaps was a stabilizing influence, or a trained and unyielding core, such as a competitive athlete relies on. One source says Deneb Algedi as a rising star grants the ability to wring joy from sorrow. Not entirely satisfied, I looked up what astronomers have learned about these stars. Rukbat and Deneb Algedi are both binary stars emitting inexplicably extreme amounts of radiation.
Fixed Star Pollux in Conjunction with Pluto
The fixed star Pollux is within the official boundaries of the constellation Gemini, the zodiac's Twins, but through precession (the Earth's axis turning on its own axis, so slowly that its motion is not apparent during a human lifetime) Pollux is now astrologically in the zodiac sign Cancer. Sylvia Plath's natal Pluto was at 23 degrees 27 minutes of Cancer, just past conjunction with natal Pollux at 22 degrees 16 minutes; within one degree. Pollux therefore exerts some influence on her Pluto, and through Pluto, on her chart and character.
We now face the fact that Pluto, the solar system's most threatening, obscure and slowest-moving planet, takes 248 years to circle the zodiac once, and was cheek-to-cheek with the fixed star Pollux from September 1932 to July 1933. This complicates matters. Public figures born in and around that time seem to share, in their formative years, only the unprecedented background hum and gripping dramatic tension of radio programming. It happens that everyone born from July 1914 to August 1938, a span of twenty-four years, was born, like Plath, with Pluto in the sign Cancer. So Pluto's influence is said to be less personal than generational or transpersonal, granting each generation a discernible preoccupation and a legacy. For those born with Pluto in Cancer, including Plath's husband and friends, and maybe your grandparents, that preoccupation was defense, its flip side chronic insecurity.
A reading of Sylvia Plath's Pollux from an astrologer well-schooled in classical mythology who had never heard of Plath might be thus: "Pollux, the twin of Castor, was a boxer, a pugilist, so this fixed star's effect, when in conjunction with a natal planet or cardinal point, is to prod the native always to be spoiling for a fight. With the planet Pluto in conjunction with Pollux, the native perceives the stakes in any and all conflicts to be life or death, because Pluto, named for the lord of the underworld, destroys and regenerates, poisons and cures, and is associated culturally with the phoenix bird and historically with nuclear power."
I have somewhere read a passage blaming Plath's Pluto-Pollux conjunction for Plath's displays of bad temper. I would venture that everyone born between 1914 and 1938 had that same potential close to the surface, with reason.
Fixed Star Algol in Conjunction with Plath's Chiron
Algol is the "winking eye" star in the severed head of the monster Medusa, carried in the sky by the constellation of her killer, Perseus. It is a universally dreaded and malefic star. Algol in Arabic means "head of the demon"; the word "alcohol" shares its root. Telescopes prove Algol to be a triple star system, two of its stars regularly eclipsing each other. Appearing to the human eye to be a single star, Algol dims from second to third magnitude and back every 69 hours, "winking" as does no other star.
Algol activated by an astrological conjunction has always meant bad news. Natives might literally lose their heads, as did the mythical Medusa, or figuratively, as did New York's U.S. House representative Anthony Weiner, born September 4, 1964, with his natal Jupiter in conjunction with Algol. In 2011 Weiner sent women photographs showing his unclothed body from the neck down only, then denied doing it. He at last surrendered to the FBI in 2017, on May 19, a day the Sun was aligned with Algol, putting the guillotine to his reputation and career.[25] The many gruesome Algol case studies seem to lend substance to this star's association with an early and violent end. Princess Diana of Wales, born July 1, 1961, her natal Venus in conjunction with Algol, died at age 36 in a car wreck. As did Plath, movie comedienne Jayne Mansfield, born April 19, 1933, had Algol in conjunction with her natal Chiron (Chiron, pronounced "kyerahn," will be explained.) Mansfield died in a 1967 car wreck and rumor said she had been decapitated. Yet thousands of people with Algol contacts live long and successfully. Every natal chart has 10 planets and four cardinal points, so the chances of a natal contact with Algol are relatively high. Hating to tell clients anything distasteful or distressing, today's astrologers are rethinking Algol as a portent of "mischief" rather than disaster, and are rehabilitating mythical Medusa as the unjustly murdered symbol of women's primal power and righteous rage.
Exactly two degrees from Plath's Algol, at 25 degrees 14 minutes of Taurus, was Chiron.[26] Discovered in 1977, Chiron is a burnt-out comet orbiting completing a circuit of our solar system every 50 years. This type of orbiting body, neither planet nor asteroid, is called a centaur. Plath of course never heard of Chiron, but astrologers embraced Chiron so swiftly and fully that by 1988 a catalog of planetary positions valid for the entire twentieth century was revised and reprinted to include the position of Chiron.
Astrologers take very seriously astronomers' namings of newly discovered orbiting bodies such as centaurs and asteroids and draw astrological correspondences from the names and their classical associations. Thus the asteroid Juno (a potent factor in Sylvia Plath's natal chart) represents marriage; the asteroid Eris represents conflict, and so on. The mythical Chiron, instead of the usual incorrigible hybrid of man and beast, was a healer and teacher, but had his own wound that all his art could not heal. Chiron's discovery in 1977, it is said, represents the awareness emerging in the 1970s that all humans are inwardly wounded and in need.[27] Ted Hughes's natal Moon was in exact conjunction with Chiron, signifying a twice-gifted but wounded psyche driven by a hybrid nature. Plath's Chiron in conjunction with fixed star Algol suggests violence stemming from feminine rage or outrage and a tragic inability to heal herself. Because Algol is Medusa's winking eye, it is tempting to conclude that Plath's inner wound was dealt by her mother, the subject of Plath's poem "Medusa," but saying so does not make it so. The poem "Medusa" makes no reference to anything remotely like Algol.
As of 2015 a crater on the planet Mercury is named "Plath," for Sylvia Plath, and doubtless an astrologer will soon claim it signifies or symbolizes something about the real Sylvia Plath. In case you think I am making fun only of astrologers, consider that it is most firmly believed that Plath suffered terribly from the psychological wound inflicted by her father's death when she was eight years old. Following a scientifically baseless, purely metaphorical line of thinking called Freudian, Plath came to believe, and her fans still argue, that this wound haunted and crippled Plath's emotional life and determined her future. Based on case studies there does seem to be something to it.[28]
Plath's Heliacal Fixed Stars
"Heliacal" fixed stars rise or set with the Sun on the day of one's birth and on every birth anniversary thereafter. All people born on October 27, of any year, worldwide, at the latitude of Boston, Massachusetts, have the same heliacal stars as Sylvia Plath. Heliacal stars need not belong to the constellations of the zodiac. The specific hour of birth does not matter.
Heliacal fixed stars in a chart are minor points of interest. They do, however, award Sylvia Plath the brilliant fixed star Spica as her heliacal rising star. Spica is universally called a giver of gifts and talent, often world-class artistic talent.
Plath's heliacal setting star was Alpheratz, its name in Arabic "meaning "navel of the mare."[29] It marks one of the corners of the Great Square in the constellation Pegasus. In 1922 astronomers, who do not consult with astrologers, assigned Alpheratz to the constellation Andromeda, and as that constellation's brightest star it is nicknamed "head of the princess."
Ptolemy said Alpheratz has thoroughly positive energy. Alpheratz through its association with Pegasus is related to freedom and speed. Ebertin-Hoffman links Alpheratz with popularity.[30] While Plath lived, popularity was a project she managed with effort and expense. With Alpheratz as her heliacal setting star, governing later life and after, she won popularity as a writer and icon only after her death. "Anonymous of 379" calls Alpheratz, rising or setting, a positive influence on marriage or travels. Plath's transatlantic travels in the 1950s were opportunities unusual for a woman in her early twenties who was not born rich. Her married life was largely positive and productive, yet the influence of any fixed star would have been overwhelmed by weightier factors in her natal chart and in her husband's. Had she known that, she might have made other choices.
To return to Sylvia Plath's poem "Words," which began this discussion, the poem's final lines in full say, "From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars / Govern a life." Hughes's poem "The Bee God" says, "[f]ixed stars / At the bottom of the well" (Birthday Letters, 152). A folk belief says that from the bottom of a well the stars directly overhead are visible even in daylight. That is untrue. But the two poets are in accord on the inversion of the natural order: Their fixed stars govern not from the vault of heaven but from underwater (Plath's "from the bottom of the pool") and underground (Hughes). Despite this radical displacement the stars continue to govern. The only change is that they shine upward, toward the earth's surface, where humans dwell with the forces of nature.
In "Words," speechless natural forms such as tree trunks and a pool suffer deliberate blows and disruptions that make them ring, echo, well with tears, and ripple. These vibrations, struck from wounded sources, form words which flee in all directions like unbridled horses. Years later their maker encounters on a road the same words, "dry and riderless," perhaps printed. They continue to circulate and resound while "a life," unnamed, an entity without identity, is governed, the poem says, by fixed stars sunken and submerged rather than heavenly. These fixed stars are nameless, undifferentiated, and fixity is their only trait the poem's speaker cares to name. "Fixed" and nothing else implies that these stars, earthbound, no longer part of the celestial clockwork, cannot move or be moved. How they became earthbound is not said. Nonetheless, they govern "a life" from where they are.
Plath's poem "Years," written November 16, 1962, jeers stars as "bright stupid confetti." In the poems Plath wrote between that poem and "Words," written February 1, 1963, the phrases "Starless and fatherless" ("Sheep in Fog") and "Ceiling without a star" ("Child") suggest that without stars, guidance is absent. The usage is metaphorical, but it is literally true that stars serve humans as useful navigational guides. "Fixed" and "govern" peg the stars in "Words" as specifically astrological and having their own agency. "Words" seems to say that the grandly infinite, godlike cosmic forces light-years away have been grounded and stilled, and only chthonic forces such as death and decay now govern "a life," which by definition must be mortal. Meanwhile, words travel at will and pay no mind to matters such as lifespan.
Originally published in ______.
Footnotes
[1] Ted Hughes in the poem "A Dream," p. 118 in Birthday Letters, wrote, "Not dreams, I had said, but fixed stars / Govern a life."
[2] Ted Hughes to Olwyn Hughes, October 1956, Letters of Ted Hughes, p. 77-78. The hand-drawn astrological chart reproduced with the letter is Olwyn's conception chart.
[3] The British Library's website displays a selection of charts Hughes drew up for individuals including Sylvia Plath at https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/astrological-charts-by-ted-hughes, retrieved May 7, 2020.
[4] Sylvia Plath to Aurelia