I've found an "early" attribution of the song to WPM, though it is still 25 years after his death and 40 years after Spencer's copyright.

The two familiar stanzas of "The Rose of Tralee" are attributed to Mulchinock in John Boyle O'Reilly's "The Poetry and Song of Ireland" (N.Y.: Gay Bros., 1889), p. 860. This may have been the source of the influential 1953 attribution in another big anthology of Irish poetry.

The words are minutely different from what we're used to. It is a "cool" crystal fountain that "lies" in the vale. And "Mary all blushing" sat listening to me. No "India" stanza, however.

O'Reilly prints one other poem attributed to WPM called "Music Everywhere." It rhymes "fountain" and "mountain" in one place, but overall it clearly lacks the gracefulness of "The Rose of Tralee." What led O'Reilly to think WPM was the author is a good question.

Several more poems by WPM appear in "Holden's Dollar Magazine" for 1850. None is the "Rose" and, again, IMO, none is as smoothly written. The same goes for the two WPM poems in "Songs and Ballads by the Most Gifted Poets of the Emerald Isle"(N.Y.: F. Tomsey, 1880).

"The Ballads and Songs of William Pembroke Mulchinock" (N.Y.: T. W. Strong) appeared in 1851. I find no online image. A lengthy and negative review appeared in "The American Whig Review" of 1851; it quotes WMP's verses extensively, but there's not a mention of "The Rose." Nor is there one in a favorable review in the "Southern Literary Messenger" the same year.


FWIW, any "battle thunder" in India worth mentioning in a Victorian poem would presumably have occurred during the Indian Rebellion/ Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. That would have been a decade after Spencer's song appeared.

I can hardly believe that the Tralee tourism version of events, including WPM's burial next to the grave of "Mary O'Connor" is entirely bogus. My cynical guess is that someone noticed the graves in Tralee, knew WPM wrote verses, and BOIINNNG!!!! the whole sad story popped into his (or her) head. Folklore is born. Or so it would seem at the moment.

I would still like to know where the "India" stanza came from. What WPM would have been doing in India as a "war correspondent" when, as far as I can tell, there was no war, is another good question. The first "war correspondent" is usually said to be William Howard Russell, who covered the Crimean War in the 1850s.