When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandles, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

Jenny Joseph

The poem is popularly known by many titles including, of course, the actual title Warning, as well as by When I Am An Old Woman, The Purple Poem, Old Woman, I Shall Wear Purple, simply Purple and by other affectionate names.

Jenny Joseph was born in 1932 in Birmingham, England and was first published by John Lehmann in the 1950s. Her first book of poems, The Unlooked-for Season (Scorpion Press 1960) won her a Gregory Award and she won a Cholmondeley Award for her second collection, Rose in the Afternoon (Dent 1974). Two further collections followed from Secker, The Thinking Heart (1978) and Beyond Descartes (1983). Her Selected Poems (Bloodaxe 1992) contains poems from all these books.

Her other books include Persephone (Bloodaxe 1980), a fiction in prose and poetry, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; The Inland Sea (Papier-Mache Press 1989), her first American book; Beached Boats (Enitharmon 1991), a collaboration with photographer Robert Mitchell; Ghosts and Other Company (Bloodaxe 1995), a poem from which won the 1995 Forward Prize for Poetry; Extended Similes (Bloodaxe 1997), a prose work; and All the Things I See, a selection for children of her poetry, (Macmillan 2000). Her best-known poem Warning was voted the Nations's Favorite Poem in a BBC poll in 1996 and is anthologized worldwide.

In 1996 she was awarded an Arts Council Traveling Scholarship which enabled her to spend time in Austria and Eastern Europe, exploring her interest in translation. A number of her poems have been used in song cycles and choral works in Great Britain and in the USA. She lives in Gloucestershire and she has recently completed working on a book about gardening and smell titled Led By The Nose.