Jenny Joseph - Warning

 

English Literature

Joseph’s most celebrated poem, “Warning,” was written in 1961, when she was just twenty-eight. It first appeared in The Listener in 1962 and was later included in her 1974 collection Rose in the Afternoon, The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse, and her Selected Poems (1992).

The poem gained remarkable popularity in the United States in the early 1980s after Liz Carpenter—former executive assistant to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and press secretary to First Lady Lady Bird Johnson—ended an article in Reader’s Digest with “Warning.” The article reflected on rediscovering joy in life after recovering from illness, and the poem’s inclusion struck a powerful chord with readers. Soon after, the greeting-card industry embraced the poem, led by graphic designer and calligrapher Elizabeth Lucas. Joseph herself credited Lucas for much of the poem’s success, writing:

“To her business acumen and energy I owe a hospitable following in California and later throughout northern America, more social, as I said, than literary.”

In 1996, a BBC poll named “Warning” the United Kingdom’s “most popular post-war poem,” confirming its lasting cultural impact.

Its iconic opening lines—

“When I am an old woman I shall wear purple,

With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me”—

went on to inspire the Red Hat Society, an international social organization celebrating aging with boldness and joy.

Such was the poem’s popularity that an illustrated gift edition, first published by Souvenir Press in 1997, has since been reprinted forty-one times. “Warning” was also included in the anthology Tools of the Trade: Poems for New Doctors (Scottish Poetry Library, 2014), and a copy was gifted to every graduating doctor in Scotland that year.

Ironically, Joseph herself disliked the colour purple, which is precisely why she chose it for the poem—a quiet act of rebellion that mirrored the poem’s spirit of playful defiance.

In 2021, the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford announced that the one-millionth image digitised for the Digital Bodleian project was Joseph’s first handwritten draft of “Warning,” a fitting tribute to a poem that continues to inspire readers across generations.