The next lines of Ovid's poem veer from a direct comparison between the Bible and his verse that tackles matter in more detail.  Milton considered the task that he was up against to say something about the Bible. This explication depends wholly upon the work of  Nathan Covington Brooks and the scholarship he passed along over 140 years ago.  Was he especially mindful of his task of rendering Ovid sensible to the believer?  Milton wondered aloud if anyone could scarcely write another word about his subject once he was done with it, showing a good sense of humor while poking fun at himself.  Ovid is not competing with the Bible, rather he left record of the thought of mankind toward our beginnings as far as he was able to compile and give an account of it.

Ovid launched into the state of things from a more deterministic and scientific view describing the earth as Chaos

a raw confused mass, nothing but inert matter, badly combined discordant atoms of things, confused in the one place. There was no Titan yet, shining his light on the world, or waxing Phoebe renewing her white horns, or the earth hovering in surrounding air balanced by her own weight, or watery Amphitrite stretching out her arms along the vast shores of the world. Though there was land and sea and air, it was unstable land, unswimmable water, air needing light. Nothing retained its shape, one thing obstructed another, because in the one body, cold fought with heat, moist with dry, soft with hard, and weight with weightless things.1

Ovid relates the expected order to come in terms of the gods coming along as being the operants of nature and their natures individually expressed as what we see.  He introduces things that have mass, weight, flow velocities, and physical properties which in combination have measurable effects upon the whole and one another. This kind of chaos has form yet does not retain its shape and defines disequilibria. Here again the viewpoint is that for the eyes of mankind.  

In contrast the Bible describes the state of affairs in a different way. In the Gospel of John, we read that the worlds were spoken into existence and some have averred that the creation of the universe was the result of the thought of God.  If so, the Jesus Christ expresses the Father as the creative Word.  Not only this we are informed of the fact that everything in time, space, and matter are held together and is ordered by Him.  Did John respond to Ovid directly as inspired by the Holy Spirit, or did he correct the natural deterministic view that has the operation of nature dependent upon the gods by inspiration of the Spirit of Yahweh?  The latter is more likely the case and inclusive of the former because worldview is one great thing that God sought to correct by sending His Son to us. God invites us to see creation from His point of view as He is Truth.  He is the Alpha and Omega and the universe is in His sovereignty attended in the smallest units of time, space, and matter as well as the largest.  He is involved in the affairs of this earth as well as that of the heavens and His Heaven.  This worldview given us by revelation begins at Genesis and is consistent throughout the Bible.  Rather than consisting of the things we eat, the Bible says that as a man thinks, so he is.  Jesus said that it is not the things that we eat and then discharge into the toilet that defile us but what is in our hearts and the things that come forth from our hearts as words.  The message of the revelation of God is consistent with the spiritual, psychological, and physical aspects of mankind; which in turn is consistent with the whole of the universe.  The creation story of John is as follows:

In the beginning was the Word, 

and the Word was with God, 

and the Word was God. 

The same was in the beginning with God. 

All things were made by him; 

and without him was not any thing made that was made. 

In him was life; 

and the life was the light of men.

And the light shineth in darkness; 

and the darkness comprehended it not.

John 1:1-5

Jesus is the source of the life that is the light of us all.  This is a great statement because the problem of chaos swallowing up the creation, that darkness of disorder cannot master the light that shines into it.  Light then is declared the victor over darkness.  Jesus is that life and that life assures out existing in light.  He came to secure us from what was before the creation and the chaos that was the earth. This very description is said in other ways from Genesis, the TaNaK, and on through to the Revelation of Jesus Christ and is the essence of Salvation in the here and now and throughout Eternity.  There is now no need to fear the reversion to chaos, the serpent swallowing the egg.  The word translated as comprehended can be translated as mastered.  It is light that masters darkness, not the other way around.  The earth will revert to its former state, physics tells us that as does the Parousia.  However, it is becoming reconciled with light rather than darkness that is the salvation from it.  The gods that do have to do with the operations of nature are not nature in the sense Ovid and other classical writers aver.  However, they that are of the earth, of the Prince of the Power of the Air, will pass away with the earth and the universe unlike the Holy Angels.  The withdrawal of the Holy Spirit who restrains evil (harm) and the final withdrawal of Jesus from this universe will culminate in the final and Great Last Destruction when time will end.  We do not know when that will be, whether a day, a thousand years, or a million year; but it will come to pass and the earth melt with a fervent heat as told to us by Peter who was inspired by the Holy Spirit.

Just as God was at the beginning and is responsible for the beginning, so was Jesus.  John goes on to describe Jesus as He is and as He was when He stepped into time as flesh. Jesus was announced by a man, His cousin John the Baptist, and he was sent to bear witness to Jesus, giving the required three witnesses available to all who would believe, then and now.  The Apostle John says that the world was made by Jesus, although the world did not know Him.  Here is an example of a mystery of God being unveiled at the proper time in history.  Jesus came to redeem people from the coiled snake, the Rahab, the abyss, and destruction.  This is done by people being born of God through Him.  This transcends nature, the creation, and is purely spiritual.  The unveiling done by God is straightforward and is not hidden and occult knowledge artificially draped with darkness.  Jesus stood before many in the open and the kosmos, the rulers of this kosmos did not recognize Him.  To be able to do so is a direct result of the volitional will of God. It is telling that John notes that the world did not recognize the One who made it.  The demons recognized who He is immediately. People are on the other hand a bit slow on the uptake at times.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light. That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

John 1:6-13

These things being true then, the Holy Spirit is the One who brooded over the face of the waters while the earth was still formless and void.  There were no Titans, PhÏbe, or Amphitrite according to Ovid, yet the Holy Spirit was present as God's design and purpose came to fruition. The Bible gives the knowledge of the spiritual.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Genesis 1:2

Ovid says that the semina were there.  The Latin semina is semen in the singular and it means seeds, the first principle of things but it is something cut off or has its origin elsewhere just as any seed does.  They are in a state of discord.  The seeds of things are contained in their own physical reality and this is in conformance with the scientific fact of the matter.  The igneous rocks that come from the depths of the mantle of the earth and find rest as mountains eventually contribute to the soils as they weather.  The cooling of the earth over time from gas to liquid to solid changed the nature of the seeds.  Magma is the parent material of the rocks and it is in this state the discordance has become.  The ultimate origin of the seeds according to Ovid is either implied to be God, assumed to be so, or it is left to the reader to assume their origin.  The egg had to have an ultimate origin.

Titan: the sun.  Titan was the son of CÏlus and Terra, and the eldest of the Titans.  As light was first created, it is possible the ancients intended, by making him the eldest of Heaven and Earth, to signify this. 

...the sun knew not his place, the moon was ignorant of its powers, and the stars knew not the stations they were to occupy.

Voluspa in the Edda

Cornua: the extremities of the waxing and waning moon are called horns.  In passing from conjunction with the sun to opposition, from the new moon to the full; and her horns are blunted when passing from opposition to her third quarter.

The moon that rose last night, round as my shield,  Had not yet filled her horns

Douglass

The moon Wears a wan circle round her blunted horns.

Thomson

PhÏbe: A name given to Diana, or the moon, on account of her brightness.  It is the feminine of PhÏbus, as Diana is the sister of PhÏbus, the sun.

Circumfuso aëre: The atmosphere is the thin elastic fluid the encompasses the earth on all sides.  Contrary to the old wives tales the ancients knew the earth was round.

Earth with her nether ocean circumfused

Their pleasant dwelling- home.

Milton

Ponderibus librata: balanced by its own gravity.  Pythagoras had long before demonstrated the true nature of the solar system, and the gravitation of the heavenly bodies.

The rest to several place Disparted, and between, spun out the air,

And earth self-balanced on her centre hung.

Milton

Noticeably, Milton understood as the ancients most likely did that the gravitational aspect of the Earth was most dense at the center and is responsible for there being an atmosphere. The Bible recognizes from the Book of Job the nature of the earth in space.  Jesus demonstrated His knowledge that the earth is round and that it rotates with day on one side and night on the other as He says people asleep at night and working in the fields will either be left when He comes back for people or leaves some.  Evidently this was not news to the people of His time while He was with us.

He stretcheth the north over the empty space, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.

Job 26:7

It is interesting to note that astronomical perspective of the universe from earth is based on north.

Primary Explication Source 

Nathan Covington Brooks, The Metamorphoses of  Publius Ovidius Naso, A. S. Barnes and Burr, New York, 1860.

1 Source Ovid - The Metamorphoses, translated by A. S. Kline, ©Copyright 2000 A. S. Kline, All Rights Reserved, This work MAY be FREELY reproduced, stored and transmitted, electronically or otherwise, for any NON-COMMERCIAL purpose.