From its first draft – which has never before been analyzed – to its final version, Earle Birney’s celebrated poem “Bushed” moves between the two extremes that Northrop Frye suggests are central themes in Canadian poetry: satire and tragedy. Although critics frequently label Birney a satirist, and the first draft of “Bushed” is clearly satirical, the final version published in Trial of a City and Other Verse (1952) has more in common with tragedy. Birney’s extensive revisions to “Bushed” are illuminated in light of his condemnatory view of satire as the adolescence of irony, most clearly expressed in his criticism on Chaucer. Revealing Birney’s highly negative attitude toward satire may help resolve a peculiar pattern in Birney criticism wherein he is celebrated as a satirist even as the quality of his satires is questioned.