Ziya Gökalp, a sociologist with systematic thinking, produced his new syntheses and combinations based on dichotomous opposites. A close look at Ziya Gökalp’s poems reveals that this paradigm of thought continues in a poetic sense. Gökalp frequently uses words with opposite meanings together in his poems, and this poetic rhetoric serves a function that cannot be explained by the art of contrast. Based on this observation, this study examines the construction of meaning in Gökalp’s poetic language, using the structuralist theory of binary oppositions as a foundation. The most productive ground for this examination is the poet’s book Yeni Hayat (The New Life). The poems in this book are crystallized expressions of the New Life ideology in verse form and are rhymes in which abstract concepts are defined and related to each other. In particular, Gökalp’s four different poems, first published under the title “Towards the Law” (Yasaya Doğru) are rich in data showing that the poetic sentence, which develops through contrasting meanings and acquires a characteristic quality, uses binary oppositions in two different patterns. This observation also leads to a classification of the ways in which abstract concepts are positioned through equations established in the form of oppositions/equalities. Thus, this study first concretizes the dichotomy established between “religion as an individual emotion” and “worldly work/law associated with a divine origin.” Based on this classified structuralist pattern of dual oppositions, it proposes a structuralist method, starting from poetry, for mapping Ziya Gökalp’s thoughts.