Episode 1: When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple
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Commercial success is not one of those pitfalls you often associate with poetry. In fact it’s been known in every age as one of the most penurious vocations a person could be called to. So what poet wouldn’t dream of success, of writing the ultimate poetic blockbuster? Though success can be a double-edged sword, of course. Just as Led Zeppelin came to hate “Stairway to Heaven,” poet Jenny Joseph came to hate—for a while at least—a little poem she had written in her 20s about ageing. Welcome to Rime, where we’re telling feisty tales from the history of poetry. I’m your host, MJ Millington.
“When I am an old woman I shall wear purple,” it begins; and if you think you might have heard that line before: you have. Maybe you didn’t even know it was from a poem. But the story of the poem’s fame—and the poet’s chagrin—was hardly meteoric in trajectory. In a way, its story is the kind of vindication most poets use to keep the dream alive inside themselves that their work might eventually reach readers’ hearts and minds. To misquote Eliot, it began with a whimper, and ended with a bang. Not that it’s ended yet, by any stretch of the imagination—we’ll see why a little later. Sometimes poems, like any other work of artistic expression, have a slow burn. Sometimes you publish a poem in a small literary magazine to little fanfare—but perhaps someone notices it there, remembers it, revisits it again later when it's their turn to share. And so a bit of fresh air gets blown over that smoldering ember; and given enough time you’ve got a wildfire.
That’s how it was for Jenny Joseph and a poem called “Warning.” In 1961 Joseph was living in London with her husband, Tony Coles, who was working in an old people’s home. He regaled her with tales of the strange behavior of the residents there, and that fascination with their antics gave her the idea for “Warning.”
Now, for reasons of copyright I’m not going to read the entire poem, but I will read an excerpt, and you can find a link in the shownotes for this episode on the Rime website at rimepodcast.com to a video of Jenny Joseph herself reading the poem.
Warning [excerpt] by Jenny Joseph
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 sandals, 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.
…
Fun, right? It was just a bagatelle, really—a dramatic monologue, a one-off. That’s how Joseph thought of it, anyway; but maybe it was always just a matter of time before that feisty old lady in purple caught on.
“Warning” was published in 1961 in the BBC’s weekly magazine The Listener. And that could have been the end of things right there, as Joseph had expected it to be. But it was picked up for an anthology in 1965, and then again in 1973, when Philip Larkin chose the poem for inclusion in the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse (nevermind the irony of Oxford publishing a definitive collection of 20th century verse 27 years before the end of the century). “Warning” joined other poems such as Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” and Eliot’s “Waste Land”—and readers took notice. The following year Joseph published “Warning” in her collection Rose in the Afternoon, and began to recite the poem in her appearances at festivals and readings. The poem found its way into school anthologies and radio programs in the UK where people presented their favorite writings, thus introducing the poem to more and more readers--even to people who didn’t normally read poetry, or didn’t think they liked it.
Eventually “Warning” was voted Britain’s favorite postwar poem in a BBC poll for National Poetry Day 1996, beating out Auden’s “Stop all the clocks” and Dylan Thomas’ “Do not go gentle into that good night.” The Guardian even reports that it became a favorite valediction at funerals. It might be because, unlike the two poems just mentioned by Auden and Thomas, which are also perennial funeral favorites, as anyone who’s seen Four Weddings and a Funeral can tell you—“Warning” is about a woman.
Anyway, Joseph was non-plussed about these accolades. After winning the BBC poll, her publisher at Bloodaxe Books, Neil Astley, stated that he thought that she had grown to hate the poem. She had instructed her agent to restrict its appearance in further anthologies. That was mainly due to the very different journey that the poem had embarked upon in the US. Joseph referred to the poem’s experience in America as “a sociological rather than a literary phenomenon;” and while that might be the case I don’t think it means that people loved the poem any less. On the contrary, I think America—and particularly the ladies of America—loved it so much that it actually took up residence inside them. Like the books and verse from childhood that are read and loved without any context—without author, without time period, without even the entirety of the work sometimes. That feisty lady in purple would become so integrated into people’s psyches that she became almost an urban legend, with numerous people attributing the authorship of Joseph’s poem to their own grandmothers, or friends-of-friends.
In the early 1980s Reader’s Digest published an article by Liz Carpenter, a former reporter from Texas who, during the Kennedy administration, had become the first female executive assistant to the Vice President, Lyndon Johnson. Not long thereafter she became the first professional newswoman to act as press secretary to a first lady, for Lady Bird Johnson. Carpenter was a prominent feminist as well, and was a founding member of the National Women’s Political Caucus. She traveled the country throughout the 1970s, pushing for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. After numerous presidential appointments, she was finally—and ironically, for our purposes—tapped by Bill Clinton to serve on the White House Conference on Aging.
In her Reader’s Digest article, Carpenter shared the story of fighting her way back from illness to a renewed enjoyment of life. She included Joseph’s poem “Warning” as an encouragement to readers to not be afraid of living a more spirited life, especially as they aged. And here’s where the greeting card industry got a hold of it.
And we love things that can go on greeting cards, don’t we? And mugs, and t-shirts, and tea towels, and needlework patterns. That old woman in purple was suddenly popping up everywhere; in fact, she was a marketer’s dream. It says a lot about our society’s disregard of older people, I think, that this little poem—this throwaway, as Joseph referred to it—was seized upon so strongly. The public—older women in particular—were so starved for the message of hope and joy and defiance that “Warning” offers, that they snatched it up in droves. In fact, they even created a society around it.
You’ve probably seen them out in a gaggle somewhere, in restaurants or at the mall or frolicking by the seaside, enjoying themselves immensely. You might have noticed their strange dress, strangely alike from person to person. Purple, all of them; purple from head to toe. Well, not quite head to toe. Because perched upon their heads are all manner of flamboyant red hats. “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple, / with a red hat which doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me.” If you have seen this phalanx of purple and red out in the wild, then you have witnessed the Red Hat Society in action.
The origin story on the society’s website is that in 1997 founder Sue Ellen Cooper had impulsively paid $7.50 for an old red fedora in a thrift shop in Tucson. Casting about for an original birthday gift for a friend entering her 50s, Cooper was inspired by a certain well-known poem about an old woman in purple and a red hat; she gave the friend a red hat of her own, as a reminder to grow old playfully. Other women responded to the symbolism of the red hat, and started donning their own. The Red Hat Society was born.
And just like everything associated with Joseph’s poem, it exploded. Today, over twenty years after its founding, the society has tens of thousands of chapters worldwide, and members refer to themselves as Hatters. And lest, after all of this, you continue to underestimate the socio-economic power of older women, there is even a blockbuster Broadway musical about the Hatters called Hats! Launched in 2006, it continues to be performed to this day.
Perhaps we can understand Jenny Joseph’s frustration that the idea of her poem had become bigger than the poem itself. But that’s one of the dangers—and one of the glories—of creating art: that the thing you create, if done well, ends up being bigger than what you think you made. The artist is not necessarily in control of the work just because they were the conduit for it. The spirit and life of a poem can be much more than just what’s on the page. And poets don’t always know the full scope of their own work.
Joseph seems to have come to terms with that in the end. When asked about the popularity of “Warning” she theorized that its success was due in part to the fact that, far from being realistic about old age, the poem is actually a fantasy about old age. She wrote, “Poems in which a realistic description of the condition of an old person is central are not requested much. … When people are dealing with pain and anguish in their own lives or are anxious that they might have to, they want a bit of fun from art.” Maybe it’s just that it’s a happy poem, or that the protagonist is full of verve, or that she’s thumbing her nose at convention. Maybe it’s because as an old person she’s eminently likeable. Maybe it’s simply that the old woman, although fantastic, feels more real because of it. Perhaps it’s all this and more that makes Joseph’s old woman in purple so beloved.
Despite people’s assumption that she would, Jenny Joseph never turned up for a reading in a red hat. “Warning” was not a piece of self-fulfilling autobiographical prophecy. She was not a flamboyant person. She didn’t steal flowers from other people’s gardens; in fact, the success of “Warning” allowed her to buy a quiet country cottage in Gloucestershire with its own garden. And she never wore purple. “I can’t stand it,” she said. “It doesn’t suit me.”
Rime is written, produced and hosted by me, MJ Millington. Our theme song is “Wizard of the Stars,” by Phillip Traum and the Moral Sense. Thanks for listening! Make sure to visit the Rime website at rimepodcast.com, that’s R_I_M_E podcast.com, where you’ll find complete shownotes for this and every episode; and the full text and recordings of all the poems mentioned. You’ll also find my own poetry and visual art, so check it out. And if you enjoy this podcast and want to support it for free, please leave Rime a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts. Those ratings really help potential listeners find the great stories we’re telling here. Until next time!
Sources
Astley, Neil. “Jenny Joseph reads ‘Warning.’” Vimeo.
https://vimeo.com/13879748
Brownjohn, Alan. “Jenny Joseph obituary.” The Guardian: Culture, Poetry. 19 Jan. 2018.
www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/19/jenny-joseph-obituary
“Jenny Joseph: 'I shall wear purple' poet dies.” BBC News: Entertainment & Arts.
www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-42700952
Joseph, Jenny. “Jenny Joseph on the popularity of her poem ‘Warning.’" The Lancet. Vol 354 (Literature and Ageing), November 1999. pp. 30-32.
Lister, David. “Poetry's unlikely heroine hates her most popular work.” The Independent, 10 October 1996.
www.independent.co.uk/news/poetrys-unlikely-heroine-hates-her-most-popular-work-popular-writer-has-more-than-one-best-loved-1357761.html
“The Red Hat Revolution.” Red Hat Society Webpage.
www.redhatsociety.com/general/custom.asp?page=red_hat_revolution