Poetry Is A Pipe Poem by Paul Hartal

'Poetry is a Pipe' declared the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard
after seeing Rene Magritte's painting,
titled La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images) .
The Belgian Surrealist artist's famous 1929 painting
shows the image of a pipe
under which he wrote:
Ceci n'est pas une pipe (this is not a pipe) .
The painting, a concrete, or visual poem,
rises as an intriguing paradox:
It is an obvious lie which reveals the truth.
While the image shows a pipe,
a picture in fact is not an actual pipe
but only an image, a visual representation of it.
Thus, the facetious painting is a witty,
simultaneous amalgam of truth and mendacity.