Upright the Four of Swords is read as rest, recovery and a deliberate pause after strain; reversed, as restlessness, burnout, or being pushed back into action before recovery is complete, though some readers take the reversed card instead as the rest finally ending, a convalescence completed rather than interrupted.
That reversed ambiguity is worth noting explicitly, since it is one of the clearer instances in the deck where practitioners genuinely disagree about which direction the reversal points, recovery denied versus recovery concluded, and a reader should generally clarify which convention they are using rather than assume the querent shares it. Waite's own printed meaning for the reversed card, a return to activity after necessary retirement, actually favors the more positive reading, completed rest, over the burnout reading many contemporary sources now default to.
The card's Thoth title, Truce, points to a different but related tradition: rest here as a negotiated pause between opposing forces rather than as recovery from injury, closer to a ceasefire than to a sickbed, and readers working from the Thoth deck specifically sometimes bring a more strategic, less purely restful sense to the card than Rider-Waite-Smith practitioners do.
In practice, most readers treat the Four of Swords as permission as much as description, an instruction that rest is not optional at this point in the situation rather than merely a report that rest is happening.