Jesus Bettelt Analysis

“Jesus bettelt” is like “Erwartung” taken from Weib und Welt. The title “Jesus begs” implies that Jesus is the speaker of the poem. He asks someone, who at the end of the poem is identified as Mary Magdalene, to give everything of herself to him, including her heaviest burden. The poem consists of two stanzas, each containing seven verses. Compared to “Erwartung”, it has a very strict form. In each stanza, two rhyming tercets in trochaic tetrameter are followed by a thorn line. Each tercet starts with a catalectic verse followed by two complete verses. In the two tercets of the first stanza, even the number of syllables of each word is identical. Only the seventh and the fourteenth verse are written in trochaic dimeter. Both the rhyme scheme and the metre emphasise thus the last verse of each stanza.
In the first verse, the speaker asks the addressee to give him a golden comb. Instead of the equally suitable “geben” (to give), he uses the verb “schenken” (to bestow or to gift) that suggests the act of giving should not result from a sense of duty or compulsion but the wish to give. It also implies that the comb will be his to keep and cannot be taken back. The reader might wonder who the person is that owns such a precious object and if

He then asks her to put her heart on the parting of his hair, which can be interpreted as a blessing gesture that further develops the idea of the tenth verse. Instead of requesting this gesture with another imperative, he uses the question “willst du nicht?” (do you not want to?), urging her to confirm that, of course, she wants to give him everything of her. The repetition of “dein Herz” (v. 13) further emphasises the urgency of his question. Jesus does not need to beg. He does it anyway as he wants her to give herself and particularly her biggest burden to him of her own