Songfacts®:

• Written by Sting, this is the fourth track from the band's second album. Drummer Stewart Copeland lists it as one of their best album cuts.
• Sting borrowed lyrics from "Carrion Prince (O Ye of Little Hope)," a song he wrote for his previous band, Last Exit.
• This was released as a single in the US, France and Germany, but only charted in France, where it peaked at #6.
• The second line of this song, "when the evening spreads itself against the sky," is taken from T.S. Eliot's 1920 poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Sting noted in Lyrics By Sting: "What is it Eliot said? 'Bad poets borrow, good poets steal'?"
  
  Something like that. What Eliot actually said (from his 1920 collection of essays The Sacred Wood): "One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion."