This is a hauntingly beautiful song about introspection, specifically about looking back at a relationship that started bad and ended so poorly, that the narrator wants to go back to the very beginning and tell himself to not even travel down that road. I believe that the relationship started poorly because of the lines:
"Take me back to the night we met:When the night was full of terrors: And your eyes were filled with tears: When you had not touched me yet"
So, the first night was not a great start, but the narrator pursued the relationship and eventually both overcame the rough start to fall in love with each other:
"I had all and then most of you"
Like many relationships that turn sour, it was not a quick decline, but a gradual one where the narrator and their partner fall out of love and gradually grow apart
"Some and now none of you"
Losing someone who was once everything in your world, who you could confide in, tell your secrets to, share all the most intimate parts of your life, to being strangers with that person is probably one of the most painful experiences a person can go through. So Painful, the narrator wants to go back in time and tell himself to not even pursue the relationship.
This was the perfect song for "13 Reasons Why"
Come on, hop on, let's take a ride
Come and meet the travelers who came to town
They have a tale from the past to tell
From the great dark between the stars
We are a special speck of dust
A fleeting moment on an ark
A celebration, a resthaven of life
Lay on a field of green with mother Eve
With Father Pine, reaching high
Look at yourself in the eyes of aye-aye
Unfolding rendezvous
Deep into the past
Follow the aeon path
Greet a blade of grass
Every endless form most beautiful
Alive, aware, in awe
Before the grandeur of it all
Our floating pale blue ark
Of endless forms most beautiful
Beyond aeons we take a ride
Welcoming the shrew that survived
To see the Tiktaalik
Take her first walk, witness the birth of flight
Deeper down in Panthalassa
A eukaryote finds her way
We return to the very first one
Greet the one we'll soon become
Lay on a field of green with mother Eve
With Father Pine, reaching high
Look at yourself in the eyes of aye-aye
Unfolding rendezvous
Deep into the past
The lonely eon path
Greet a blade of grass
Every endless form most beautiful
Alive, aware, in awe
Before the grandeur of it all
Our floating pale blue ark
Of endless forms most beautiful
Deep into the past
The lonely eon path
Greet a blade of grass
Every endless form most beautiful
Alive, aware, in awe
Before the grandeur of it all
Our floating pale blue ark
Of endless forms most beautiful
Come and meet the travelers who came to town
They have a tale from the past to tell
From the great dark between the stars
We are a special speck of dust
A fleeting moment on an ark
A celebration, a resthaven of life
Lay on a field of green with mother Eve
With Father Pine, reaching high
Look at yourself in the eyes of aye-aye
Unfolding rendezvous
Deep into the past
Follow the aeon path
Greet a blade of grass
Every endless form most beautiful
Alive, aware, in awe
Before the grandeur of it all
Our floating pale blue ark
Of endless forms most beautiful
Beyond aeons we take a ride
Welcoming the shrew that survived
To see the Tiktaalik
Take her first walk, witness the birth of flight
Deeper down in Panthalassa
A eukaryote finds her way
We return to the very first one
Greet the one we'll soon become
Lay on a field of green with mother Eve
With Father Pine, reaching high
Look at yourself in the eyes of aye-aye
Unfolding rendezvous
Deep into the past
The lonely eon path
Greet a blade of grass
Every endless form most beautiful
Alive, aware, in awe
Before the grandeur of it all
Our floating pale blue ark
Of endless forms most beautiful
Deep into the past
The lonely eon path
Greet a blade of grass
Every endless form most beautiful
Alive, aware, in awe
Before the grandeur of it all
Our floating pale blue ark
Of endless forms most beautiful
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Some notes off the top of my head, as an evolutionary biologist. I must say I enjoy this song very much as a card-carrying #ScienceIsMetal enthusiast...
Adding to that which RoyBoy has already mentioned;
The "floating pale blue ark", the Earth, is likely a reference to Carl Sagan's "pale blue dot" speech, as is the "special speck of dust"- considering the same album contains the track "Sagan", it seems very likely ;)
"Look at yourself in the eyes of aye-aye" is a reference to Douglas Adams' travel book Last Chance to See, in which he describes himself looking, very briefly, into the eyes of an aye-aye before it disappears into the Madagascan jungle, saying "I was a monkey looking at a lemur". To Adams, the contact with the other branch of the primate family was a reminder of the strangeness of evolution, and a reminder of how by geographical happenstance, lemurs survived on Madagascar while their distant cousins the apes came to dominate the rest of the globe.
It should be mentioned that the writer Douglas Adams was a close friend of Richard Dawkins (who reads the introductory text from Darwin), and a fellow atheist. While not a biologist like Dawkins, Adams (who died in 2001) was fascinated with evolution and quantum physics and the awful and yet beautiful randomness of the universe we live in.
By referencing Sagan and Adams, Tuomas Holopainen and Nightwish are aligning themselves with this particular way of thinking, secular scientific belief in a deterministic, evolutionary universe that is macrocosmically and microcosmically overwhelming and reminds us of our own insignificance while teaching us that the Earth, while not chosen or special in a religious sense, is singular (as far as we know so far) in being a haven for life like ours, and that everything biological on it is not different from us, but actually related to us - and this in turn makes our petty squabbles with our fellow men ridiculously pointless by comparison. Nightwish's song and the album itself is therefore a tribute to these humanist, pacifist and scientific secular worldviews, combined with Nightwish's own quasi-pagan, pantheist spirituality (which appears in passages like "greet a blade of grass").