Upright the Page of Wands is read as curiosity, enthusiasm and free-spirited exploration, eagerness at its most unformed and least tested; reversed, as recklessness, a lack of direction, or hesitation that stalls the same enthusiasm before it starts.
As a court card he carries the deck's double reading, standing for a young or youthful person, or for an influence of fresh inspiration entering a situation; readers commonly treat him as the deck's most purely enthusiastic figure across all sixteen courts, since unlike the other three pages he faces no water, wind or settled ground to react to, only an open desert and his own sprouting staff.
Waite's own printed meaning, a dark young man, faithful, a lover, an envoy, a postman, generally news of some sort, is more concretely a messenger reading than the personality-trait reading of curiosity and free-spiritedness most contemporary practice now favors, another instance of the deck's general twentieth-century drift from event-cards toward character-cards.
Because the Princess ranks are structurally the least fixed of the court, carrying no decan and standing at the entry point of each suit's elemental matrix, some commentators read this page's characteristic hesitancy, enthusiasm without yet a plan, as built into the position itself rather than as any personal failing.