Fireside (Symbol)
The fireside symbolizes the luxuries that one already has in his life which shouldn’t be taken for granted.
The Sky (Symbol)
While the Sky generally refers to bright things, the sky here symbolizes the lostness that everyone’s soul is prone to. As we saw in the story, the closest the consciousness came to peace was when the heron was on land by the fireside.
The Heron (Symbol)
The Heron in the short story symbolizes every human being’s lost soul. When the Heron flies around, in the story, that suggests that the soul is searching for peace which will come from reaching some sort of understanding of life and everything that it’s about.
The church, the Commonwealth of the Future (Symbols)
Those represent world orders in different ages. The church represents an older time even for Virginia herself when the church was the ruling power in the whole continent. The Commonwealth is representative of the new world order of Britain colonizing a large part of the world, or maybe it could refer to the league of nations which her husband’s work helped lay the foundations for and which in turn helped in establishing what we now know as the United Nations.
