There we must imagine without having anything to stand upon in the way of experience.

Of course if born again into a body we could imagine many things; but there is the ghostly interval between death and birth which nobody is able to tell us about.
Here the poet depends upon dream experiences, and it is of such an experience that Christina Rossetti speaks in her beautiful poem entitled "A Pause." They made the chamber sweet with flowers and leaves, And the bed sweet with flowers on which I lay, While my soul, love-bound, loitered on its way.
I did not hear the birds about the eaves, Nor hear the reapers talk among the sheaves: Only my soul kept watch from day to day, My thirsty soul kept watch for one away:-- Perhaps he loves, I thought, remembers, grieves.
At length there came the step upon the stair, Upon the lock the old familiar hand: Then first my spirit seemed to scent the air Of Paradise; then first the tardy sand Of time ran golden; and I felt my hair Put on a glory, and my soul expand.
The woman is dead.

In the room where her body died, flowers have been placed, offerings to the dead.

Also there are flowers upon the bed.

The ghost of the woman observes all this, but she does not feel either glad or sad because of it; she is thinking only of the living lover, who was not there when she died, but far away.