remember an instance of this
within one verse of a negro song from the time of the American Civil War:--

Don't you see de lightning flashing in de cane-brakes?
Don't you think we'se gwine to have a storm?
No you is mistaken--dem's de darkies' bayonets,
And de buttons on de uniform!

Examples of this sudden turn from the vague to the real are found
throughout Jeremiah's Oracles of Doom. Here are some of them:--

Wind off the glow of the bare desert heights,
Right on the Daughter of My people,
It is neither to winnow nor to cleanse,
In full blast it meets me...:
Lo, like the clouds he is mounting,
Like the whirlwind his chariots!
Swifter than vultures his horses;
Woe! We are undone!

For hark a signal from Dan,
Mount Ephraim echoes disaster,
Warn the folk! "They are come!"(83)
Make heard o'er Jerusalem.
Lo, the beleaguerers (?) come
From a land far-off,
They let forth their voice on the townships of Judah,
[Close] as the guards on her suburbs
They are on and around her,
For Me she defied.(84)

There is a similar leap from the vagueness of IV. 23-26, which here
follows, to the vivid detail of verses 29-31 already rendered on page 45.

I looked to the earth, and lo, chaos,
To the heavens, their light was gone,
I looked to the mountains, they quivered,
The hills were all shuddering.
I looked and behold not a man,
All the birds of the heavens had fled.
I looked for the gardens, lo desert,
All the townships were burning.

Or take a similar effect from the Oracle on the Philistines, Ch. XLVII. 2,
3.

Lo, the waters are up in the North,
The torrents are plunging,
O'erwhelming the land and her fulness,
The city and her dwellers.
Mankind is crying and howling,
Every man in the land,
At the noise of the stamp of the hoofs of his steeds
At the rush of his cars,
The rumble of his wheels.
Fathers look not back for their children,
So helpless their hands!(85)

Or take the Prophet's second vision on his call, Ch. I. 13 ff., the
boiling cauldron with its face from the North, which is to boil out over
the land; then the concrete explanation, _I am calling to all the kingdoms
of the North, and they shall come and every one set his throne in the
gates of Jerusalem_. There you have it--that vague