To illustrate formally the meaning of the output of this command, consider a general second order ODE
The nth symmetric_power of ODE is another ODE having for a solution the nth power of the solution of ODE. For example, the solution of ODE can be written - formally - using the Maple DESol command; dsolve represents it that way:
where in the above DESol(...) represents any linear combination of two independent solutions of ODE. The first symmetric power of ODE is then ODE itself (has for solution sol^1) and, for instance, for the second and third symmetric powers of ODE we have