Upright the Knight of Wands is read as adventure, passion and impulsive momentum, energy that moves before it fully plans; reversed, as recklessness, impatience, or the same energy scattered past any useful direction.
As a person card, he is conventionally read as bold, charismatic and driven more by feeling than by calculation, and readers commonly distinguish him from the King of Wands on the same axis the Golden Dawn's structure draws formally, the King's Fire of Fire as mastered direction, the Knight's Air of Fire as intellect swept along by fire rather than governing it; where the King sets a course and holds it, this knight is still discovering his course by riding toward it.
Waite's own printed meaning, departure, absence, flight, emigration, ties the card more concretely to travel and leaving than the broader passionate-momentum reading most contemporary practice now favors; the drift toward reading him as a personality type rather than as a literal departure follows the general twentieth-century pattern seen across most of the deck's court cards.
Because the Golden Dawn assigns him no zodiacal decan of his own but a full thirty-degree span framing Sagittarius's onset, some commentators read his restlessness as structurally built into the position itself, a court rank defined by transition between signs rather than settled within any one of them.