The strangest thing about "nightmare" is how gently it begins. There are no monsters and no chase, only a figure at the edge of a dock, "alive, unharmed." That pairing of words is the kind people use only when they have feared the opposite. The poem never says who Daisy is or what happened to her, but the text suggests she has been lost, and the dream hands her back. The horror comes from watching that gift taken away.
The second stanza sets up the dream's logic. The speaker calls her name, walks "towards her / in a trance," and is already crying. The tears arrive before anything has gone wrong, as if grief is something the speaker carries into sleep. Everything is in the present tense, so the reader is inside the dream with no safe distance from it.
The third stanza shows most clearly how the poem is built. The name is repeated: "Daisy, Daisy, Daisy. / Daisy. Daisy-". The commas turn into full stops, then into a dash that cuts the word off, like a breath running out or a voice cracking. Then comes the shout, "DAISY!", where capital letters stand in for volume. The next lines move fast: "As she shimmers / And disappears / And I wake up / In a pool of sweat." The repeated "And" strings the events together with no pause, so the loss and the waking feel like a single drop. "Shimmers" is a well-chosen verb. It suggests heat haze or a reflection on water, something that looked solid but was only a surface. These lines also begin with capitals, unlike the lowercase lines earlier. Whether or not the poet intended it, the change lands at the moment the dream breaks.
Water runs through the poem. There is the dock, then the "pool of sweat," then the "Turbulent waves / Threatening to pull me under." The poem never says Daisy drowned, but judging by the imagery, water is where the speaker's fear lives, and the body's sweat becomes the sea. Waking does not end the nightmare. It carries it over. The last stanza opens with the name again, but quietly now: "Daisy." with a full stop, no exclamation mark and no dash. After the shouting it sounds like someone saying it to an empty room. "Threatening to pull me under" is also never completed. The waves only threaten, and the speaker is left stuck in the moment before going under.
The ending removes sound. "I'm shaking and screaming / But I can't hear anything / Anymore." The word "Anymore" sits alone on its line and hangs there. It implies there was sound a moment ago and now there is none, like the muffled quiet underwater. It is unclear whether the speaker's own screaming has gone silent, as it often does in dreams, or whether panic has blocked out every other sound. That uncertainty means we cannot tell whether the speaker is fully awake. Daisy never speaks in the poem either. The speaker calls and calls and gets no reply, and the final silence is the answer.
The form supports all this. The poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular rhythm, and its short lines leave plenty of white space. Without rhyme there is no click of resolution, so the poem stops without settling. The lines stay short, which mimics the speaker's gasping, hurried thinking.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it turns the usual idea of a nightmare around. The dream is the comforting part, the one place where Daisy is whole, and waking is what hurts, because it makes the loss real again. By leaving Daisy's identity open, the poem lets any reader fit their own loss into it. In under thirty lines it shows how grief can take over sleep, the body, and finally the senses.