Canter Bridge

The unhurried pace of `When We Dance’, the opener to a decade’s anthology of Sting’s best work, could serve as an icon for the artist’s contribution to serious popular music. Pensive, elegant, emotionally resurgent, the song captures the burden of the man’s music. Perhaps the highest compliment this reviewer can pay the collection and the reservoir from which it was drawn is just this: unlike the figures in Sting’s balladic poetry, the music refuses to grow old.

The title track, `Fields of Gold’, is another of Sting’s story-spinning masterpieces. Elevating his and his lover’s bond to mythic levels by contrast to the `jealous sun’, Sting writes the poetry of love song better than any of his contemporaries. The musical phrasing plays its role flawlessly as well, brief instrumental interlude occuring at exactly the right moment and without overstaying its welcome.

`All This Time’ is perhaps the closest thing to a creed that one will find in Sting’s repertoire. Brilliantly written, cunningly skeptical, deeply individualist, resonant almost of Emerson, it turns a phrase as well as any. Speaking of two priests who’ve turned up to administer last rites to a dying man, Sting sees them, unsympathetically, `Fussing and flapping in priestly black // Like a murder of crows’. The entire song deserves quotation:

I looked out across
The river today
I saw a city in the fog and an old church tower
Where the seagulls play
I saw the sad shire horses walking home
In the sodium light
I saw two priests on the ferry
October geese on a cold winter’s night

And all this time, the river flowed
Endlessly to the sea

Two priests came round our house tonight
One young, one old, to offer prayers for the dying
To serve the final rite
One to learn, one to teach
Which was the cold wind blows
Fussing and flapping in priestly black
Like a murder of crows

And all this time, the river flowed
Endlessly to the sea
If I had my way I’d take a boat from the river
And I’d bury the old man,
I’d bury him at sea

Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the earth
Better to be poor than a fat man in the eye of a needle
And as these words were spoken I swore I hear
The old man laughing
‘What good is a used up world and how could it be
Worth having’

And all this time the river flowed
Endlessly like a silent tear
And all this time the river flowed
Father, if Jesus exists,
Then how come he never lived here

The teachers told us, the Romans built this place
They built a wall and a temple, an edge of the empire
Garrison town,
They lived and they died, they prayed to their gods
But the stone gods did not make a sound
And their empire crumbled, ’til all that was left
Were the stones the workmen found

And all this time the river flowed
In the falling light of a northern sun
If I had my way I’d take a boat from the river
Men go crazy in congregations
But they only get better
One by one
One by one…

The enigmatic `Be Still, My Beating Heart’ brings artistic and emotional discernment to the task of sorting out the opportunity cost of speaking, of understanding, of opening up, of choosing to love or to flee the prospect of being loved.

The anthology includes Sting’s most potent political statement, one that demonstrates the power of art to change minds. `They Dance Alone’ tells the story of bereaved Chilean mothers whose children have been `disappeared’ under the Pinochet regime. Weaving the story of these sad-eyed women who `dance alone’ because their men have gone into a slow dance suffused with hope transposes Sting’s gift for chronicling love and love’s loss into a new key.

`If I Ever Lose My Faith in You’ is Sting’s iconic declaration of this love for this woman as a thing that eclipses Everything Else. It is vintage Sting, without which no compilation of his work would deserve the name.

`Fragile’ is an act of the most intelligent brooding. Spare orchestration befits its single, gloomy thought:

If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one
Drying in the colour of the evening sun
Tomorrow’s rain will wash the stains away
But something in our minds will always stay
Perhaps this final act was meant
To clinch a lifetime’s argument
That nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could
For all those born beneath an angry star
Lest we forget how fragile we are

On and on the rain will fall
Like tears from a star like tears from a star
On and on the rain will say
How fragile we are how fragile we are

On and on the rain will fall
Like tears from a star like tears from a star
On and on the rain will say
How fragile we are how fragile we are
How fragile we are how fragile we are

Fields of Gold reminds Sting fans that it was indeed a remarkable decade. Sting lifted our hearts and filled our minds inimitably or—as the artist himself might have it—in my fashion.