«You told me: my father never wept; / you told me: my grandfather never wept.» Storni begins from an inherited command: the men of her line do not weep, they «were made of steel». But as he says it, a tear springs from the one who tells her, and falls into her mouth.
And that tear is poison: in it the poet drinks down at once the «grief of centuries» the men kept silent. The ancestral weight of the title is that burden held in for generations, which the soul — «a weak woman, a poor woman who understands» — can barely bear.
The verse is kept in Spanish. Translating it in passing would replace the work with a paraphrase of it.