"The worms they crept in"

[Baker, John]

        Several versions of the children's poem that includes the lines, "The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, The ants play pinochle on your snout" (or variants thereof), have been collected in Sherman & Weisskopf, Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts: The Subversive Folklore of Childhood.  However, the original reference presumably is to the poem Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogine, which originally appeared in the novel The Monk, by Matthew Gregory Lewis (1796).  The Monk is available as a Gutenberg text, and the poem can be read on a stand-alone basis at http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a_110.pdf.  "The worms they crept in, and the worms they crept out" is its most famous line.

John Baker