Peach cave

 There is a Chinese poem, maybe more than one but I am thinking of one by Wang Wei, https://www.cn-poetry.com/wangwei-poems/peach-blossom-journey.html based on a legend of a fisherman who finds a cave on a river bank, with peach blossoms falling into the water and entrancing him. He goes into the cave and finds people who have old fashioned clothes and speak an old fashioned dialect. They are peaceful farmers and welcome him warmly.  Apparently they took refuge in this hidden part of the world many years ago, escaping some war or political turmoil, and haven't had contact with the outside world. The fisherman stays a while, but eventually decides to go back. His idea is that he can find the entrance to the cave again. But the landscape shifts shape and he can never find it again. 

The poem takes you to this place. The poem itself is that place. Poetry itself is this world where you can go. The poignancy is in the idea that the return is impossible. The poem can be read again, though. 

The world where the community lives is not magical in and of itself. The people living there are just normal farmers. The magic is in the separation from the outside world, and nothing more. The old fashioned garb and language suggests a kind of nostalgia or quaintness, with an element of time travel. The Qin dynasty is 221 BCE, and the legend arises 500 years later, and is still alluded to centuries after that, in the Tang dynasty.  

The magic portal is one that can be found, in theory. It seems both magical and literally possible at the same time. The shifting landscape is literally possible as well: rivers change their course over the years and human memory is fallible. Peaches actually exist, and the blossoms of the tree might fall into a river, but peaches also symbolize immortality.  

Chinese poetry is all about state craft and war. The poets are government functionaries, and the examination to be a functionary consists of writing poems. Even a recluse fishing in a river in a little boat is likely to be a retired mandarin, or perhaps one who has fallen out of favor. There's one poem where someone wonders whether he can afford to be a recluse, so it is more like voluntary austerity, not impoverishment. 

Maybe the magic, then, is the escape from political turmoil.  In some versions of the legend, the farmers live in peace and "pay no taxes." Utopia is just normal life, then, kind of like how Tolkien envisions the Shire, self-sufficient and peaceful.  

There's another few poems that allude to this:

A bridge flies away through the wild mist,

Yet here are the rocks and the fisherman's boat. 

Oh, if only this river of floating peach-petals

Might lead me at last to the mythical cave!

(Chang Hsu)

Though you think to return to this maze of mountains,

Oh, let them brim your heart with wonder!

Remember the fisherman from Wu-Ling

Who had only a day in the Peach-Blossom Country. 

(Pai Ti) 

The story could have a thousand variations, depending on how the emphasis falls. This is how I envision poetic thinking. That the poem draws you in with a particular kind of cognition that is not exactly like anything else. It reminds me of my idea about music: that it evokes another reality, something that belongs to another world, but that its magical quality is that it does so in our own world.