"The worms they crept in"

[George Thompson]

Very, good work by John Baker.

I remember the out/snout rhyme, but nothing more.

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African
Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Baker, John" <JMB at STRADLEY.COM>
Date: Thursday, September 16, 2004 7:04 pm
Subject: Re: "The worms they crept in"

>        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
>