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. For Joseph, purple symbolized deliberate transgression: the choice to wear what one “shouldn’t,” to behave as one is “not supposed to,” and to find delight in that refusal.
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—still inviting them, decades later, to imagine aging not as diminishment, but as permission.
