Throughout Seamus Heaney`s collections, we can trace the poems on a death motif as many as those of the landscape in Northern Ireland community. That`s because whenever Heaney suggested the changes into new vision of poetry, he had signalled those changes through the poems on both historical and personal death. His final book, Human Chain, however, focuses on describing a death motif itself, and Heaney begins the book with the poem on the near death experience from his mild stroke in 2006. Correspondingly, this paper tries to explore Heaney`s `looking back` and `looking forward` on life and death based on Martin Heidegger`s “Being-toward-death” and Vladimir Jankelevitch`s philosophical consideration of death. And it tries to embrace the poet`s route toward universality as well. In Human Chain, Heaney depicts death as continuity and circularity, not as finality or termination. This makes it possible that Heaney completes not only a powerful chain of human but also a great chain of poetry.