Choose a figurative comparison from any of Heine's "Lorelei" and unpack it, looking for the target domain, the source domain, and any entailments you can think of. How does this help you interpret the poem?

On the most basic level, Heine's "Lorelei" presents a picture of a beautiful mermaid-like girl who sits on a rock overlooking the river Rhine and, through her singing, causes a boat captain to become so enraptured that he crashes his vessel against the rocks. This watery setting with the mermaid would thus be the source domain, the thing literally shown to us. The target domain, the deeper abstract meaning, could be a number of ideas. The point might be that human beings tend to be blinded by superficial beauty, and that this leads to their destruction. Or, it could be that in life in general, physical and aural beauty, represented by the Lorelei, the girl on the rocks in both her appearance and her song, are often simply a facade, a cover for something ugly and destructive. One entailment—a fact or conclusion necessitated by a statement—could be that the Lorelei knows her song is hypnotic and is thus deliberately bringing the boatman to his death.
A deeper overall meaning to the poem can be suggested. Heine tells the story as a kind of re-creation of a legend, saying it is "a fairy-tale from olden time that I cannot get out of my mind" ("ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten/Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn"). Romantic poetry often concerns itself with the legendary past and takes the form of a fairy-tale for grown-up people. Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci," almost exactly contemporaneous with Heine's poem, is similar in theme and treatment. Heine used this olden-time atmosphere (which on this higher level can be considered a source domain) in order to project the abstract meaning—the target domain—that the significance of legendary and mythical concepts is perpetual, and that these primal ideas apply to modern life as well. The target domain can also be seen as a message of pessimism in the abstract. The speaker almost resignedly concludes by saying "I think the waves devour the boatman and his boat at the end" ("Ich glaube, die Wellen verschlingen / Am Ende Schiffer und Kahn"), as if he is merely reporting an old tale which is depressing in being so revelatory of man's misfortune.