In Roman mythology, Neptune is the God of the Sea.  The sea can be a most unforgiving mistress under the influence of Neptune’s wild mood swings.  Calm one moment, stormy the next.  During the worst storms, you can feel your world is both upside down and inside out as you just try to ride out the wild waves of pure fury while holding on for dear life to your life-raft you like to call control, or sanity.  And if you’re unlucky enough to have the cold waves sweep you overboard, then you feel the icy grip of Neptune reaching up from the bottomless depths to squeeze your heart and soul with despair.  And the depths truly are bottomless for the more you sink the more you think you can’t go any deeper.  But you can and you do.  As Neptune pulls you deeper into his arms, the pressure keeps building, squeezing all the joy out of you until all you feel, all you know, is coldness and darkness.  Eventually, the coldness freezes all of you so that you feel numb.  And after a time, safe.  So that trying to leave Neptune’s now comfortable embrace is the hardest thing to do.

Our eighth planet was probably named Neptune due to is deep blue color. Neptune has the strongest winds recorded in the Solar System with speeds over 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) per hour with an extremely cold outer atmosphere with temperatures averaging -364F (-220C).  Deeper down, it’s thought that the atmospheric pressure is so great that it actually rains diamonds.  Imagine falling down through the clouds of Neptune being ravaged by the ferocious storms of unfathomable wind speeds.  Of first the extreme cold of the upper atmosphere freezing you solid inside and then the pressure of the lower depths squeezing your world tight until you’re numb and feel like you will implode from the pressure of just surviving, let alone living.  Triton, the largest moon of Neptune and also the coldest place measured thus far in the Solar System and has active cryovolcanoes (ice volcanoes) is being slowly pulled closer to Neptune and it’s fate will be to either plunge into Neptune’s embrace or break up to become a new ring about the ice giant.  This is the metaphor used in the poem Triton’s Neptune Blues.