Abstract This essay discusses Seamus Heaney’s ‘Route 110’, from Human Chain, as an example of life writing as embodied in the very specific genre of poetry. His use of Virgil’s Aeneid Book VI as a type of cultural unconscious is examined, and each of the works are viewed as tesserae, which are brought together as a type of mosaic through translation and a dual perspective. Heaney has described this poetic sequence as an attempt to translate parts of Book VI of the Aeneid. ‘Route 110’ is also read in the light of Heaney’s book-length posthumous translation of Aeneid Book VI, and all three texts cohere and combine to form the mosaic of significant aspects of his life, as seen from an older perspective. The sequence is read in terms of the connection between the two books as an attempt to explore aspects of Eros and Thanatos in his own writing