The Tears in Cupid's Eyes

Twice in The Rose That Grew from Concrete, Tupac headed a poem “4 Jada”. This refers to Jada Pinkett, with whom he was close friends at the Baltimore School for the Arts. The other piece appears directly before it in the book and is simply titled Jada. The Tears in Cupid’s Eyes is the second of these poems and one of the shortest in the volume: it captures a farewell in a few lines.

Nature Takes on the Pain

The poem consists of a single scene: on the day the addressee leaves him, it rains without ceasing. The speaker explains this in his own way: the rain is the tears in Cupid’s eyes. Nothing more happens. The poem lives entirely on this single image, in which nature takes on the pain that the speaker himself does not utter.

What exactly the “leaving” is about, the text does not say. Tupac moved with his family from Baltimore to Marin City, California, in 1988, and according to the preface, the poems in the book were written between 1989 and 1991. It is therefore plausible to read the lines as a farewell across distance: as the loss of closeness through relocation and time. That remains an interpretation. A romantic relationship between the two is neither meant nor documented.

Cupid’s Tears Are Followed by His Smile

In the book, Cupid’s Smile II follows immediately, reversing the same image: there, too, it rains, but afterward comes the sun, and the sun is Cupid’s smile. Whether the two poems were written together is not known. In the sequence of the book, they seem like two sides of the same mood.

Cupid appears as a figure several times in Tupac’s love poems, such as in Hours Pass By and What I See!.

More about the book and all poems in the introduction.