In this essay, two renowned modernist poems – T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Miyazawa Kenji’s Haru to Shura (1924) – were explored. Both may include ethical aspects, but their religious component is more prominent. The aim is to discover how this component functions in each text. Eliot’s poem needs no introduction, but Miyazawa, though famous in Japan, is much less so in the English-speaking world. To analyze the texts, my expanded version of M. Riffaterre’s semiotic theory of the structure of modern poetry was used. According to the theory, a modern poetic text is generated by two underlying ‘matricial’ propositions, each of which produces a set, or paradigm, of variant images having the same underlying semantic structure. This paradigmatic method of signifying is a characteristic of modern poetry. Each matrix is reconstructed by the reader from a comparison of the images of each set. The matrices are linked syntagmatically in a variety of relations, such as negation or difference of scale. The bimatricial text (subject–sign) has an intertextual counterpart (object–sign) of similar structure but different lexicon. The interpretant of these two complex signs has a sociolectic counterpart of similar lexicon but different structure. The semantic contrast thus established produces innovation, which is the other distinctive feature of modern poetry. This theory will be applied to Eliot’s and Miyazawa’s poems to investigate the roles of religion in them.