Many have gasped at Emily Dickinson's picture of a bird feasting on a worm, but I find in The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford, 1952) a precursor.
The sources are given as Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book (c. 1744) and similar volumes of the late eighteenth century. I suppose it's not impossible that she may have known one or more of them, or received it from a nanny's memory, but perhaps she had learnt one of the later expurgated versions, and felt the necessity of inventing the tang of the original:
Little Robin red breast,
Sitting on a pole,
Niddle, Noddle, went his head.
And Poop went his Hole
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