During the summer of 1864, amidst the flood of impressions from his first summer in Italy, Ibsen wrote a short poem entitled “Fra Mit Husliv.” Translated literally, the title would read “From My House-Life,” although “From My Domestic Life” would be kinder to the English ear. In four 5-line stanzas, the poem treats two sudden shifts in mood in a domestic scene. It begins with the house interior quiet and the street outside “dead,” the living room wrapped in soft shadows. It is a time of contemplation and implied intellectual reflection. Suddenly, the narrator's children come tumbling into the room, freshly scrubbed and lively, and the mood shifts to laughter and tumult. Then, just as suddenly, “just as the game was moving along at its best,” the narrator catches a glimpse in a mirror of a “stocky guest” looking back at him with leaden eyes, a closed vest, and slippers. At this moment, a weight falls on both the narrator and the happy children, who suddenly turn shy, clumsy, and subdued “in the proximity of a stranger.”

Herleiv Dahl's reading of the poem in his classic 1958 overview study of Ibsen's poetic production concurs with those who interpret the “wild flock” symbolically, with the children standing in for the untameable characters from Ibsen's frustrating work on “Epic Brand” in 1864. In a brief mention of the poem in the Centenary Edition of Ibsen's collected works, Didrik Arup Seip reads it biographically instead, as an example of Ibsenian self-criticism and a hint of his sense of failure on the family front. Seen in that light, the emphasis would land on a poet plagued by self-reflection and melancholy, unable to participate fully in the joys of family life. One might also see continuity in theme from “On the Heights,” written five years earlier, in which ties to family had to be sacrificed for the sake of an artistic calling.