The Fear in the Heart of a Man

“Dedicated 2 My Heart”: Tupac addresses these verses to his own heart. The poem The Fear in the Heart of a Man appears in the first part of the book The Rose That Grew from Concrete. It tells of a vulnerability that men rarely admit.

Courage Against Attackers, Panic at a Broken Heart

The poem begins with an assertion of strength: the speaker boldly stands up to an attacker, because his heart fears no man. Yet from a broken heart he runs away in panic, out of fear of going blind on a vulnerable night. In the speaker’s view, this fear resides in every man: some admit it, others never understand it.

This is followed by a brief theory of the heart: there is no fear in a shallow heart, because shallow hearts do not break. Hearts that truly feel, by contrast, are so fragile that even a gust of air endangers them. Whoever wants to be honest must give away their fragile heart regardless, risking experiencing great joy or having it returned torn apart.

Emotional Courage Is Harder Than Physical Courage

It is natural to read the poem as a contradiction to the tough-man image that Tupac himself would later embody so effectively. Here, he separates physical courage from emotional courage and declares the second to be the harder one. In the book, No-Win stands in contrast: there, the speaker is backed into a corner and describes violence as a dead-end situation.

According to the foreword by Afeni Shakur, the poems were written between 1989 and 1991; no exact date is documented. On the album The Rose That Grew from Concrete (2000), Q-Tip recited the poem.

More on the book in the introduction.